2.27

Solomon pulled his shoes on and lay back down on the ground.
In his pockets he had three pieces of hard candy and a piece of paper with his father's name.
There wasn't any reason to leave the door but he still tried to reach his shoes to tie them.

2.25

Have you ever felt like you bent back the fingernails of your emotional self? God knows I've reached out too fast for everything and my stubby child-like hands just smash up against things. Have you ever felt your soul-cuffs scraping the pavement with every step because life keeps buying your pants too large? Sometimes I feel like I'll never grow into myself. Have you ever been like this? I feel like I'm alone.

There are a hundred million people who have been in my position. There are a hundred million more living it right now, with me, and I could write it down exactly and throw it into the ocean, safe-corked in its own bottle, for the outgoing tide to tear away from me, and I know that whatever shore it found there would be someone there feeling the same accursed thing, waiting in the surf for the bottle to knock them in the shin. Even so, I still feel as though there's nobody out there who feels this same thing I do.

Have you ever felt like pushing your self out the door into the late summer night to smell the dying flowers in the hazy heat of our infant planet? Have you ever felt like asking who lives in the mud you've squished between your crusted toes? Have you ever cried for no reason when you're trying to fall asleep, too tired to succumb and too sad to admit that you know exactly why you're crying? Have you ever tried to hide a smile?

I think we all have.
I feel like I'm alone.


Maybe we are.


[This is autobiographical, of course. Almost everything is (to say otherwise would be to pretend you're stupider than you look). I'm exhausted, but I'm not depressed. I'm sad, but I'm not overwhelmed.]

2.13

There's a tree outside that's covered with fruit, and often the ripest will fall to the ground. Sometimes, these will split, spraying the grass with a thin mist of citric acid and sugar water. The ants have learned. Now days, if I go to pick up the fallen fruit, there are round holes and an empty rind. I wonder how many ants I keep alive by looking the other way when the wind blows?

2.10

This isn't poetry or prose art. It's not even interesting.

Reading about Siegfried Sassoon, I realize the unbelievable sequence of lucky coincidences that have to all work together in order to end with some writer being published, becoming influential and famous, and having biographies (five, by last count) written by other people about his or her life. I also realize how utterly banal it is that it should happen at all. The poetry of Siegfried Sassoon is not the best poetry I have ever read, but it was published, collected, and anthologized. He is recognized as important.
What is the separation between his work and mine? Skill? Chance? Powerful contacts? Rich family? His participation in the most horrifying warfare yet experienced by mankind? It might be all of them or none of them, since they're all true in varying degrees. I don't know why he should be published at all. Literature makes no sense anymore.

2.6

I am an amiable malcontent:
running my mouth off,
principal fooled,
stealing my youth for my own damn needs,
skipping school.

I am a fabulous mystery:
lying too smoothly,
friends confused,
making Chicago my carnival wonderland,
nothing left true.

I am a sad story:
lives destroyed,
nothing learned,
riding off into my fabulous
sunset unearned.

- Ferris Bueller

2.5

Today was the first time in a month I saw something beautiful. I was walking along Ambs drive in the cold after-rain, wearing one jacket and carrying another. My shoes made a consistent wet rubber noise on the new concrete with every step. And I looked up. There, in front of me, across two neighborhoods, a highway and a train track, the sun shot sideways across hills of rippled green. No houses, no trees, just grass and the dirt underneath, but the old golden light of a near-ended day carved crowns of the lonely ridge above me. Beauty is always so far away here, just at the edge of sight or further, always curtailed by buildings and con-trails. I miss my moonlit nights of high fervor.

2.4

I'm crouching in the reed bed,
drooling mouth a blood red,
staring at a new prey,
hoping fate will obey,
willing muscles wound taut,
burning just a single thought--

Tiger.

I'm munching in the dry heat,
a living taste of fresh meat,
poem drawing to an end,
hoping one last day to spend--

Goat.

2.2

Which direction is unhappiness? Explain the road map. Blue lines, or black? Bold, or? Are the highways that direction big, multi-lane monstrosities with dozens of motorists all around you, jostling around for space in the faster lanes, everybody rushing to get somewhere they haven't paid attention to? And then they get there, and shake the sleep from their eyes, and realize their foot is still jammed down against the pedal, and their engine screaming, the car shaking itself to pieces, as they hang in midair, falling through the realm of unhappiness.

1.24

I woke up with a burning ache to use a new word at some point today. I just can't seem to work it into normal speech, you know? I've been trying to bend each conversation that way, but I end up so stilted and unexpected, slowly rolling the boulder of my mind closer to my goal. None of my discussions seems to last quite long enough. Maybe towards bedtime I'll just call a 511 number and blurt it out, hang up, and turn out the lights to sit in darkness.
It's okay. I'm used to it. It happened yesterday with "polyamory" and the day before with "interregnum." I get a new word every day. Now I've got a new one: I guess it's "quotidian."

1.20

The swindle of Jason Dorrigan was almost complete. Twenty thousand dollars lay, crisp and clean, stacked and sorted on the countertop of the closed-for-business nouveau riche café. Jason looked, kindly, into his precious con artist's eyes, so ravenous and strong. Now that the money was within Billy's grasp, the whole escapade was nearing an erstwhile attitude, and nostalgia for the time he was currently living threatened to choke Jason. He pushed the satchel across the counter, as though indicating that it was, finally, okay for Billy to hungrily shovel the short stacks of greenbacks safely away. Jason knew he would never see the fake children who were supposedly getting a new playground with this cash. He made a mental note to donate a concomitant sum to the Catholic daycare down the street, as though that would somehow absolve him of this six-week sin he had engaged in. You know, at the end, it was rather good, and well worth the money. His mother wouldn't understand, but then, she thought a cruise was a good investment. She hadn't had an exciting day since the sixties.
Jason nearly broke down when, satchel on his shoulder, Billy paused at the door. But the dashing criminal only pushed out into the wind-whipped streets of Jason's suddenly unfamiliar city without a backward glance.
"Goodbye," Jason croaked, and pulled out his telephone to tell his banker to stop investing in breakfast joints.

1.10

This small mind can't stretch too thin or it might snap. This small mind might stretch itself to encompass what it may. This small mind is pulling on its edges, stretching badly, hoping to thin and spread, hoping to swallow you.

1.9b

I was born to carry my father’s armor and to protect a village across the shining sea. My helmet is burnished and engraved with my ancestor’s names. A foreign place waits for me to protect it.

But you have need of my protection, too. You, my son, have need of light. You needn’t be afraid while I am with you, but someday, when you take up my father’s father’s helmet and strike out with intent across the shining sea, you will yourself stave off the fears of a hundred generations. Find this village of ours, wrap it in your will, and become as I am.

They will need armor; not for beasts and ghouls, but for the indecision and darkness in their souls. They will need to know that (though youth can sting) life is bright and safe. Someone will need to draw them out of their winding canyon to stand in the sunrise on the low dale and to say to them “Cry not, for I am here.”

1.9

Has it been a month, Madeline, since the last frost? Has it been a year since I broke my leg? Has it been a decade since we met? Has it been an hour since I laid down in the new-tilled field to watch the clouds go by, bugs crawling through the collar of my shirt, open eyes drying in the breeze, unwilling or unable to close?

[sorry I've been gone]

12.15

Here is a midnight thought just for you because I know you put your phone on do-not-disturb. It will be your wake-up thought.
I asked all my students what they would say if they could speak once into the minds of every person on earth, Babel-fish enabled. A few had uplifting things to say. One or two broke their mixtape or their insta.

One said something that makes me ashamed I didn't think of it.
If they could whisper anything into the heads of the globe, they would say "The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell."
I could have cancelled class. They have nothing to learn from me.

[Call your mom. I know I should.]

12.10

Cold air keeps all things:
Life, light, water, air, smog,
Close upon the ground.

[And if (on a cold morning) you look toward the sea, down into the valley, you can see the thin layers of each, trapped tight against each other by the dominance of the mountains.]