5.21

"Should we . . . ?" He's holding the menu like a wall and looking over it plaintively. She told the waiter that they had, in fact, been here before.
"Hm?"
"An appetizer, I think?" To go with their water+lemon price-saver special.
He orders nachos. ("There's only one . . ." "Yes, only one way we make nachos.") She orders a wrap, and he a burger. Both with fries.
I phase in and out of their conversation. It's inane, quotidian (a word I've stolen from the last thing I read, not ripped off the domepiece). It's safe. I'm not interested. When Vanilla Ice's opus Ice, Ice, Baby starts very quietly in the background, I cover for my involuntary "Haha yeah" by leaning away and remarking, as though to myself, "It's the nineties all over again."
When they need a box from the waiter, she sees him and makes a hand motion and a mouth noise that sounds like she choked off a call just as it thrust itself through her mind. They eventually get the box.
My waiter is earnest and kind as he explains why there's some unsolvable difficulty with the charge. The Internet is out or some such. A waitress with an attractive haircut is commiserating. She sighs and we all three laugh just a little. Our conversation is just as inane, just as quotidian (again, that stolen word). But we're in it, so it feels immediate, visceral.
I pick up my bag and walk five paces.
Wait. Did I get everything?
I turn around and hold my hands out as though the mere act of reaching will draw any lost belongings to me. My waiter has gone, but she's standing there. Her shirt says Certified Teaching Staff on the sleeve. She gives me a look like she would prefer I wasn't one of her employees if I'm incapable of remembering whether my phone is in my pocket after five steps. I close my open hands into dual thumbs-up, smile, and spin away.
"Have a good night!" she says.
A wave over my shoulder is all she gets, and then I'm out into the night. Maybe it's this place that makes me feel so commonplace. Maybe it's the weather. Every day has a gravity to it. Every day feels predetermined. It won't rain. It's likely to be sunny. There's a light wind from the west. People will drive their cars too much. And Tommy and Nicole will go back to work serving wraps and burgers and nachos to people who need boxes for their fries.

5.20

Somewhere in the high desert, there's a small patch of disturbed sand where I buried the letters you sent to me during the war. It's between two crusted stumps of Joshua trees, beneath a cholla that bit me while I dug. I didn't know until afterward that I was waiting for someone who had moved on. I didn't know until afterward that you were writing letters to assuage your conscience. Well, I lived, just as you didn't expect, and you live with someone else, which I didn't expect. I don't know which one of us is more disappointed.
It's okay, I think. You have a lovely family, and I'm lying on the still-warm sand, staring up at the stars. I had better move, though, before a scorpion finds me, before I forget which direction the car is in, before I change my mind and dig back into the hole to get back the past that has left me.
I can feel my bones shift as I stand up. I can hear the night swallow up my footprints behind me. I can see the car over the hill..
Maybe I'll ask that carhop for her number. I pulled in just a few hours ago. Maybe she's still on her shift. Maybe she'll remember the chocolate soda I ordered and didn't drink. Maybe it's time to move on. The desert seems to think so.

5.15

I have a sudden rush of memory. It's a tactile assault, as it were, from the history of my brain. Suddenly, I'm there in the bed with you again, the open window making no dent in the oppressive heat of our room, and I'm uncomfortably hot against the furnace of your skin. There's a difficulty in moving my limbs, too, as though the skin is stuck to the air around me. I peel away from your back and roll over, kicking the last of the sheets from my legs. I toss myself upright and lean against the wall. Am I in a dream again, or is this real yet? I look back in the darkness and I would swear you're not there. It's just an empty bed in a different room in a faraway place, but all the same--my legs are weak and my skin is shining.
I close my eyes and remember you again.

5.9b

I've never had a dream in which my teeth fall out.
I have never dreamed sex.
I can't remember dreams of being dead, taking tests, or growing older.
So what dearth in my life has robbed me of these common dream tropes? What paucity of will? Do other people just have smaller choices, accidentally limited by the dreams they've heard of, limited to things they've seen before? I can't imagine, but I know: whatever gamut I've been granted hasn't only been for me. If you'd like it, if you're piqued now, I would share a dream with you.

5.8

I built one wall of the building I needed to live in. With one wall standing, I walked away. Each time I rounded the corner of the driveway, I saw it haunting me. I dropped my tools and left again. This slip-shod work of half-heart power has stopped me, stopped me, stopped me, halt--and now I realize my fault. I'm going to tear the wall apart, use the bricks for different art.

Don't let the something of the past stand in the way. Destroy, then start.

[I wrote two and a half pages of a play, hated it, and didn't work on it for a week because it was impossible to use and too scary to delete. I couldn't throw it out because I thought I would be wasting my time. Cursed hindsight--I wasted my time regardless.]

5.7

I am madly in love with my girlfriend of three years and I have been trying to convince her that I have read shakespere and all that stuff, but she hasn′t been convinced. She′s so smart--I just need help for a love letter written like that guy so that she will take me seriously. PLease, you have to help! Thanks. SHe is goofy and a lot of fun, so she will appreciate it I know she will.

::I will write a convincing love letter

Thank you so much! This is such a life-saver.
Do you need more piectures of her?

::I will write a perfect letter that will make her give in
::Yes, you may add one picture
::Should the love letter focus on convincing her that you have read Shakespeare? Or should it be a general love letter to her?

I do want it to be a love letter, but can it like show that I have read shakespeare?

::So I should start with the love letter, then I conclude by convincing her that you have read Shakespeare

Yes, please. Omg, this is a lifesaver

::Great. I will make it perfect

[$31.40 is an investment in the future. I haven't laughed so hard in ages. Supposedly, this person guaranteed has a masters degree. Thank you, Dr. Don Papers.]

5.4

I think I take with me the microbes you've left on my skin. I'll have the memory of every person I've ever met, unless--my biome too strong, no purchase remains. There are those whose bacterial signature is thunderous loud in the microbial world. There are those who listen. Which am I?
I shake your hand anyway, not knowing if you'll house my flora, or perhaps you'll spread to me. Either way, someone is leaving here changed.

5.3

What right have I to write poetry? I have not studied its greatest works. I have not dissected the choices of its finest minds. I have not practiced its forms. Yet, in brief: I write, the right rights or wrongs left undone, a tapestry woven tight and bound with song.

5.2

When first I slept, life was cold in the ground hard by. As I watched, the morning sun could not, its beams a thousand piercing rays, once breach that venerable crust. My crust is a self-made prison, a rime of ancient tales and mounting fears that took me an ill-spent youth to build; a prison of myself, to myself, for myself. Where once anon you planted seeds, I saw no fruit thereby. Where yet again I saw you tread, the earth's unmarked thereby. Where now and then we passed the time, my heart is rent thereby. When first I slept, though spring encroached, life was cold in the ground hard by.

When last I slept, the world was all awrack. A noonday sun and a quiet glen had my cares belied, and I, (once careworn, cold, and clumsy,) allowed myself to sleep. What cosseted place had this once been! What blanketing power to renew! The rime away, the man remains. And yet, and yet: the time explains. It cures all wounds, dulls all pains, breaks down walls, compounds gains. I can with perfect expediency understand life's softening effect on my own jagged bones, but why have things gone so with you? Why has the wearing of the calendar served only to file down your cutting words and soften your carbide will, when in me I see the year wear down my finest features? Why then has it refined you? I take it as an attack. In my sanctum of rest, a keening lack. Suddenly, the life in me wants you back, for when last I slept, with what was all the world awrack?

When next I slept, I owned the world in pride. What blooming lavish fields lay there beside? No cares have I, or should I "we" for our sake be? I'll tell a story of a sunset. I cannot open my eyes but you are there. I cannot move my breath but it stirs your smell. I cannot fall to dream or it blanks my mind. And yet the blank would not unpleasant be. The rime forgot, the glen forgot, and only this, a field where your hands sow and my hands reap. What of this field where we sleep, our might combined to hold against all odds a dream (against the odds of time and daylight a dream we both can live to love in). Where once was morning light, the sun has crossed the wide expanse of heaven to bring in the tide, a rising urgent question I'll decide: when next I slept, I owned the world in pride: the fields I lay near were just you—heart. Mind.

I hold you whether the sun will set or no.

5.1

Today, fourteen and a half miles from the house and up in the hills where the snow only melted a week ago, I have stopped riding my bicycle. I made the ridge line, or the pass, or whatever you would call the highest point on the road, seventeen hundred feet above where I started. I have drank half a liter of water and laid out on the road in the sun with my shirt off. Where's that bird I hear, I wonder? Who put in the culvert behind me to divert the water gushing through? What was the person's name whose hands sunk the signpost for my bike to lean against?
I've regained my breath. I'm about two thirds cooked, and I know I overdid it today. I can make it home, I know I can. It's all downhill really, and some of it very steep. Besides, there's hours until sunset still. I flip my leg over the saddle and push away down the hill.

There's red cinder on either side of the road, and my tires crunch into and through it, down the lane. I'm going fast. Maybe twenty, thirty miles an hour. I'm not even pedaling; I don't have to. And then--an oscillation--(small at first, but enough to be troubling. I have had the bike worked on only a few weeks ago, but I have also been extremely hard on the old girl for a very long time, so who knows how well a check up would catch and solve all problems with her anyway) and the tire has begun to overcorrect itself, despite my hands gripping white-hot, driving all the blood up my arms and into my panicked heart, my breathing fast, my brain incapable of any thought but slow down. I squeeze the brakes ever so slightly. I can't remember which brake is front and which is back. I wish I could pull the back full-bore, but I can't risk pulling on one only to find out it's the front, to feed the shimmy and send myself into the asphalt. I'm still going twenty five, maybe. Too fast. I would lose a lot of skin. I could break something. Many things, if I land especially badly. I'm pulling on the brakes and pushing hard against the bars, hoping against hope that the oscillation will abate. It doesn't.
It gets worse.
The front wheel is flipping back and forth crazily now, faster and faster, and I'm staring at the road ahead, willing there to be no cars. The shoulder is across the opposing lane, and it's wide and rocky, and at its lip is the line of red cinder. If I cross that badly, it's game over. there's no friction in the cinder, not for lateral movement, and it seems like all my tire wants to do is move side to side. I unclip my feet just in case I need to jump from the bike. I'm panting. I'm squeezing the brakes. I'm slower, slower, slower, stopped. Putting my feet on the ground, I can feel my heart ripping against my tongue, trying to claw its way out. My mind is blank.

I lean down, pull the quick release, replace it. There's nothing wrong with my tire, nothing wrong with my wheel, nothing wrong with my bike. I push off, waiting for the worst. The brakes are singing at me--maybe it's that? I'll buy new rotors, I swear it. The tire behaves. It rides true for fourteen more miles. I feel like I'm going to die for the next half hour. I'm fine.

4.29

Clouds that hide the Earth are like clothes on a lover, aren't they? Whatever soft insatiable hunger drove you to summit this viewpoint so far from the beaten track has been so poorly repaid that the injustice of it rankles. Alone on the mountaintop, you are allowed only the simple opportunity to dream of what might lie beyond your sight. And even so, the clouds roll in. The topography is only a promise that the world cannot keep. And as you slump your way home, what will become of the dream you concocted to hold yourself intact as you threatened to shake yourself apart with desire? Didn't you come here to see a caldera? And the sky has chosen to drape your vision instead. I have no solution for you. Be content with trillium along the roadway and pines that lean down from overhead. There will be no peaks for you today, for the world is bashful of your voyeurism. And next time, check the weather before you carry your binoculars so far.

4.24

Ajam lived in the steppe he loved: the rolling hills, the warm dry winds.

Where did the wind come from? Who blew it out?

 Zel. Her grace surpasses even the brightness of the stars.

But none can say they have seen her and not be found a liar.

But they see her effects. The feel of her slips across skin on quiet nights. The men will brag about her visits, but the women are all quiet. They know more. But more than they, is Zel.
Zel's love touches Ajam most. She and the land are akin, and he can feel here that way.  He feels her in dry dust wiped from his eyes. He feels her in never still air. He feels her in open doorways and horses' manes. Once, her footprints ran to him in the sweep of a rushing wind through the long grass. He watched as her fingers dragged gooseflesh along his limbs before she was torn away by her own momentum.

Who was she?

It didn't matter to Ajam, and as such it doesn't matter to you.
He can tell you a story, you know, of each time she came to him. Each night in his sleep he would catch glimpses of her out of the corner of sight, always laughing at something he hadn't yet said, only just thought of. Sometimes, she was closer, and she would wrap her arms around him from behind, cold, and then he would close his eyes in the dream, and she would press up against him, warm, and whisper into his ear the language of the winds. He wrote these stories down with knots in string, long patterns of single and double contortions stretching back a thousand memories to his earliest moments. Each time she came to him, he would stretch a length from his pocket, today green, tomorrow orange, each visit a red, blue, yellow, all bright, all welcoming, all reflecting the mood she brought to him.

I can't see the purpose of his work.

If you can't see it, then perhaps no one can. Let me describe him to you by his actions, for this was the only description he had of her. For once he had assembled his threads a thousand thousand yards in length, each knotted with a story of her, he took them all and straightened them. His mother waited patiently for him to hang them from the door handles, from the bed frames, from the ceiling. He draped them from the roof of the yurt and the long nights when he kept his eyes closed, the dreams in which she would take his hand and run him blind-wise through the hills, these longest stories trailed even to the trough of the horses in the yard. His father was pushed out of the house for a time, told to return with a civil tongue in his head. And still, Ajam laid out his strands, the house a rainbow, his fingers callousing against the delicate work.

Your story grows more intricate.

As does his own creation.

Zel grows impatient.

Ah, you feel her too?
Ajam built for himself a loom, a thousand strands and more, and began to weave into it his stories and memories of Zel. He wove in September, when the rains came and she was quiet. He wove in October, when the grass froze and cold footprints were found circling the house in morning. He wove in November, when the wind howled against the walls and his father begged to up roots and run to the South. He wove in December and, as his shuttle clattered from its ancient purpose to the foot-worn floor boards, he couldn't hear her anymore. The world was still, and drifts three feet deep had cloistered the family. He gathered the long cloth, delicate with patterns of story-knots, and wrapped it with the last, most recent thread, the only for which there was no place. It was weak and black, and it had a thick, constant wrapping of knots, her name again and again. Placing the bundle under one arm, he dressed for the worst of the winter. He gathered his things and the most hardy pony and bid goodbye to his father, to the dogs, to the house. His mother, she didn't come outside. She had known where he was going for months now.
He knew exactly where he was walking, though he had walked it blind, for he had walked it a thousand times before in strides that broke from hilltop to hilltop, pressing the earth away and springing from it with her grace, in her hands. December broke into January, and still the world was still. And even so he walked.

Was this her wont?

You know she had never laid quiet before. This winter was different.

I won't ask this question.

I wish you would.

 What of her had changed?

January into February, and his journey led him into the woods, a world of unfamiliar places, where the land tilted toward the sky. I'm sure you understand. February into March, and the new year, and even onward he journeyed. The world broke from its winter, but did not awake. The atmosphere itself had developed a whining tension, and Ajam could feel the foreignness of the wind, even in this place where he himself was out of place. And then, he was sure, as he passed a ridge and looked into the first mountain valley his eyes had ever seen, he had arrived. It was as familiar to him as though he had lived there his whole life. He lept from the pony and slid down the hill, tearing his jacket, cutting his hands. Under his arm, he carried his whole life's work. In the small hollow between earth and heaven, at the exact place where the stars touch the planet, he found her home. He cut the string, the final string of only her name, again and again, and the cloth unfurled around him. It enveloped him, it overwhelmed him, it grew from him like a spreading wave, and yet it broke around two strange feet that weren't there. Two strange hands he couldn't see picked up the riotous cloth and each color surged in its weave. She wrapped herself in his cloth, and he could see the shape of her in his words. She spoke to him again in the language of wind, and clasped him cold in the tightest embrace he had yet received, her body growing warm through the tight folds of cloth.

Did he say what he meant to, when he saw her?

Oh, you dear fool. There was never anything to say between them.
I, too, have held the breeze. Ajam's story is my own.

4.23

[Sorry for the short posts and long absences.]

The skipper was straining for the open sea; you could feel it through the steel of the boat, his frantic energy. There was a trawler ahead of us, rolling uncertainly even with its long arms out, stabilizers attached and dragging in the waves. And the boat had begun to develop an awful tip, forward and back. The waves looked to be ten to fifteen feet tall, and the wind was ripping the foam from the crests. His voice came over the speakers, warning us all to hold on. He was going to let us taste the sea.
The Discovery was a lightly-loaded vessel, for all her bulk. Save for her cargo of sixty human lives, there was no reason the captain couldn't plow through a wave or two, ship a few thousand gallons, and still bob like a pleasant cork. But the weight of those lives weighed on him. None of these people signed up for sea-sickness. Not a single person was as excited as he was by the waves. He took three, four, singly approached, engines running slowly against a rising tide. Each wave was interminable. The boat went where the water took it in three degrees of freedom. People sitting down in the cabin, fixed to a single frame of reference, rolled and pitched in their seats. The breakers against the long breakwater kept a monotonous, pounding thunder, matching the long heartbeat of the boat. The engine trembled with the tension of his hand on the throttle. The instruments pinged and sang in the din. The ocean lay ahead, vast and measureless, calling the old salt in his blood to come home.
And, in the space of one long period between waves, he had the boat around again, tail to the ocean, nose to shore. It seemed as though the boat hadn't moved at all, so slowly did it turn on the face of the approaching swell, and somehow without looking up, it was suddenly apparent that the boat was retreating. The spell that had once had its death-grip wrapped around all our hearts had now never existed. The captain put power to the engine and soared on the backs of the waves, barely dropping the nose until the breakwater was secured as a fond memory, the surf was put away in its place, the wind was a friend whose fingers forgot their fierceness, and, finally, the ocean was a sight--and not a home.

4.19

Welcome to Fortemburg. You'd better listen up and gather 'round, you rotten rutabagas! I'll tell you a tale of adventure so chilling it will feel like I'm pouring ice into your underpants.

Brave Sir Herbert ruled this tiny town;
With enormous muscles and a tiny frown.

One day, Sir Herbert took a little walk

And someone stopped him for a little talk.

"Excuse me sir, but do you not agree

That this old pine is quite a nasty tree?"

The tree had eaten fourteen kids that day,

And "it is nasty, yes," he had to say.

But Sir Herbert found that rushing in

Caused the nasty branches to close in,

He backed away and chose to use his mind,

The only tool he had to beat that pine.

What did he do?

Brave Sir Herbert chose to disappear

With sloppy wig and paint to hide his years.

A knight no longer: now he was a treat

That wretched pine tree thought that it could eat.

It grabbed him up but soon to its surprise

Brave Sir Herbert gained the real prize.

Fourteen children, head to toe in sap,

One by one he pulled them from the trap.

Only when the final child was free

Did the brave knight turn to face the tree:

"How's it feel, you carnivoric pine?

Get out of town, 'cause Fortemburg is mine!"

Of course, he ripped it from its roots with his mighty hands and threw it in the river, and all fourteen children are alive today because of him.

4.18

I'm a waterfall of jellybeans. I have thirteen noses apiece. I walk without my toes, but you won't find me eating cheese. Why is open not as closed? Who made babies wear their clothes? Why is heaven never here, and why won't here quite yet appear?
Thanks--
One Absurd