30 october

At various points in my life, I have been the kind of person that strangers on the street will stop and tell to smile. “It can’t be that bad, let’s have a smile!” or “Such a pretty face, but so much prettier with a smile”, and so on. Is this a kind of person? I never really thought to wonder until I wrote that sentence. I guess I just assumed so, or hoped so. Otherwise, it’s just sort of sad.

When you consider all of the people in the world smiling, you wonder what they’re thinking about. How many of those smiles are purely selfish, how many are generously humanitarian, how many are…

Tiring of this fiction/nonfiction/contradiction/philosophiction, I turn away from sentences structured by form, by norms, warming to the feeling of reeling in lines with fish at the end, pretending to pull them close, but the program is catch and release! The rainbow beasts fleece the clouds, allowed to swim once more toward unremembered shores, hurrying through destinations and beyond maps, collapsing distances and resistances. These are the swimmers, the winners of races and the triumphs of action. Watching, we close our eyes and surprise our minds, we raise the blind and reach the deaf, the treble clef and other infinitely beautiful devices, catching mice in their uncertainty and turning back to the fields to do battle with plows and weather and hired hands. We are the warriors against expectation and we are the doers without, even as we seek. We are the wonderers and the wanders, we are tired and we wonder why we speak in the first person plural even as we are only one. We gain strength from our language even as we dissect it with impunity, with specificity and dreams of sense-making to come.

29 october

Too many asides for a direct conversation and I’m not sure what I’d say anyway, let’s set this elsewhere and proceed. It has come to my attention we have no dimensions deeper than reality to subsist upon and we are pawns, not prawns, and we see food to our mouths as the driving rain turns south—for how could it fall north, which is up, as we cup our hands and expand the swimming into the air? It’s fair to wonder where this is going, and if I had a script, I’d give you half, a raft to lie on, fairly and squarely, a boat to sink through, remote like the channels of English muffins crooked in their crannies and accented like those nannies who solve everything without commercial breaks. Have we made mistakes and when will we know? You and I are always cast in separate scenes, it seems to me, and that’s as may be, as may flower like pilgrims on opposite shores, laying store by our own cases and replacing the mistaken crops with hops and barrels and Christmas carols we’ve forgotten the words to. We’re humming through the figuring-out and plenty of doubts remain to be seen as hurricane means and pumpkin tides leave us peering from inside and out into the elsewhere figuring out what’s about there, weaving through the dark and scrambling on the roof.

28 october

It remains to be seen where this will go whether punctuation will be used will be abused the movement continuous delineating the space the primary colors bothering each other with such basic questions the dimensions the lessons lessening the secondary scary steps toward neglect if I had an answer I would break it in two and I would give part of one of those halves to you I’d think about the rest for a while you wouldn’t want to just eat it or keep it in your pocket or put it in a safe or something really if you had an answer would you plant it or give it to your mother would you hide it in a hole in a tree and hope your lonely neighbor would find it and would you walk for miles in someone else’s shoes and then write a book about it hundreds of years later and with a better vocabulary why do people write these stories and who else’s stories could we write other than our own we think we have these secrets but the secret is that everyone else has them too and we are delicious in our own minds and mouths we jiggle the loose tooth jewels with our lollipop tongues wiggling the sugarysweet happiness that is guaranteed no one can take from you the sweet of candy no one can turn off the sun or swallow your sleep whole there are things you can always get back even if you lose that answer you thought you had kept even if your pockets fall out and all you were holding in your fingers slips through there are secrets that we tell each other just to keep them safe and these are the secrets I’m telling to you and these are the answers I give you to keep the toast and the eggs and the slight dishwasher heat of a diner coffee cup served with a spoon that was always that bent these are the reasons to wake up and no one can take that from you when you’re breaking up and broken when you’re mistaking and mistaken you will have morning to stretch into and yours will be the day when the phone won’t take your calls and your mirror cannot answer you will have the space that is beyond you and you will fill it up you will open yourself to swallow and you will be swallowed and whole you will find peace beyond the searching and you will grow mountains and gardens and dreams yes this is the letter I’m writing myself dear past me you will be fine and should I find I need it again dear future me you will be fine

24 october

Even though I had a better way of thinking about it when I was raking the leaves I will say it now anyway even though it’s too late in the day this part will be edited out just like my friend who was on the train was saying he was too tired because he was on the train and his head would explode it reminded me of the days when I was saying my head would break and I was on trains shaking and cold and hot and sticky with exhaustion waiting for the time to slide down to the floor and through to the ground where at least it must be cooler than in this space and I remembered when he said this that nothing we were saying about thinking about how we could say nothing else nothing nothing would be left of anything else but this train and the space the shaking and the sound nothing but the rattling so too all that is left of my day is the leaves I had a clever line to deliver about a lecturer who famously gave it all away in the title but perpetually forgot and arrived at empty lecture halls and this was the punch line but it would be a poem and the rustling of the leaves as I hazarded them into a gray plastic wheelbarrow was a train rambling through the mind of how this could all be awkward but succinct the pity of the man on the stage trying to sleep through the night when his head aches and the audience is missing the lapsed attention of the attendant and the air that was never conditioned the programs that were never printed the tickets folded in a methodical manner and the leaves tucked under the bed in the compartment if you please sir this is my stop and I had a clever line if you don’t mind getting up I’ll just reach under there and pull it out and I’m sorry to bother you really I am and he draws himself up and leans on the top bunk turning to gaze through the window toward a time when this will be a memory and he too will be raking leaves and wondering about poems that will be forgotten when the piles are all composting

23 october

Here’s what I’ll do: Tomorrow I will wake up and I will write a letter applying to a job and then I will send it. I will stop looking for more jobs before I apply to the ones I find. I am writing in complete sentences to represent seriousness. These are sentences that end in punctuation. Period. Capitalization is certain. By this time you are aware of the normal nature of these lines crushed by being so defined. I have been rushing over and past and through and I am preferring to look onward and over instead of applying. How many applications are floating out there? More. More than I have answers for. The status columns read ‘in progress’ and this is not entirely helpful. I am also ‘in progress’ but do not seem to be moving very far. Now I prefer the living room loveseat. Loveseat is the new dining room table. Afternoon is the new morning. Midnight is the new day. There are sweeping reforms that could revamp all of this, but the impetus is lacking. I’m joking. Of course I’ve got it. I just keep it in my pockets. I don’t know when I might need to pull it out and really use it, you know. But really. I’m waiting. I have all of this to say, to go on and on. What am I waiting for? I’m looking at jobs, sifting through the tangled pile of possibilities. It’s clear I have qualifications, though what they add up to seems insufficient to fund any sort of future investment, and barely any regression—not that I’m turning back, no, of course not. I’m waiting for something. For someone? For someone, for you, to come along and straighten out a few questions, line up the comforter with one swift tug and smooth over the rough edges of details, answering all of the wonders and the whynots that I’ve muddled through with a wooden tongue on the broken phone—too easy to know it’s a mirror I’m peering into, that I’m the one I’m waiting for. In the end, glad to know there’s someone there after all.

19 october

qualifications

For how long

have you held

the position

to which

you are now

applying?