October Fourth

Some motor hums. A cat yowls. Children scream. A breeze sings. Leaves turn. Grass licks. Birds dive. Birds rise. Sun stings. Eyelashes glow. Bicycle strums. White fence clicks. The dirt groans. Worms bite. A pregnant teen sighs. The grass folds. A heavy belly groans. Purple flowers swing. A shadow grows. The shadow defines. A man looms. The girl sees. A bird flies. A fear grips. The man walks. He still comes. The clouds move. He sits down. The grass folds. She looks up. He looks over. She looks down. He looks away. A tear falls. The belly moves. He looks down. The breeze sighs. He sees the belly. She looks up. He looks up. Eyes. He kisses her forehead. He stands up. The grass creeks. The shadow fades. The sun stings. Eyelashes glow. Bicycle strums. White fence clicks. The dirt groans. Worms bite. A heavy belly groans.

September Twenty Seventh

Then you should fall in love. Try to forget about it and pretend it never happened but keep it in the back of your mind like a simmering pot of potato soup. You can tell all your friends and family that things are real great and put that one smile on your face- you know the one- as you walk down the street to your empty apartment, trying not to think about the journal entry turned pathetic lyrical poem mutilated and thrown around your room, silent and indifferent like wet snow in the gutter.

September Twenty Second

"Sara,"
He breathed, warm, into her ear.
A word- coursing. Coursing needles in a soft, thin walled tunnel (rip, rip, rip) of newly awoken anger and frustration.
Before then it was an impassive coldness, a sedate glassy-eyed circle. Can you please hurry up I want to get to bed alright the bedsheets are going to turn to fucking ice before you finish don't you realize it's winter for god sake get off of me before I push you off oh yeah I can't do that or you'll take it as a sign that I want on-top god then I'll never get to sleep.
"Sara,"
The needles shot, shattered glassy eyes and almost drowned them but a vision, not of the cubicle cube of living space lit faintly by sickly light of ever staring city, spitting city, scratching city but of dark, truly night swimming among leafy headed giantesses.
Sylvia breathed dirt and star dust, soaked in night and padded off into the forest. The tree, it was calling calling and the man with the moaning whistle could never take her here. And there it grew, seemed to even stretch higher as Sylvia looked upon it, gorging upon the life force of the earth to become the impossible peak Sylvia knew she must climb. Sandpaper bark, limbs on limbs on limbs, the concrete block wall surrounding their bed scratched her hands as she pushed against the blocks. Throwing him down she pushed her weight on him, and Sylvia smiled, wrapping her legs around the tree and scooting up higher, higher. The air was becoming desperately thin and her head felt sappy, dizzy but she was so close to the top- she could sense it. Leg aches, burning between them, they were there before they knew what happened and fhuuuu the wind sighed- Sylvia floated with it, down down down into the still thumping flesh.
The man slowly breathed out a long held breath and smiled.
"Sylvia,"

September Twentieth

A rolling sea pounds endlessly on the back of a small American town. A handful of dissatisfied eighteen and nineteen year olds, drinking cheap beer, linger on the edge of the shore and make crass jokes to express their inability to understand why this town seems to beat on them endlessly, why there is a pulsing rage churning just under the surface of their distressed clothes and heavy makeup.
"There is something disgusting about being a teenager," a slight, heavy lidded girl thinks as she crumples up a beer can and tosses it out of the bouncing truck, raging to the pounding music that fills the cab.

September Thirteenth

(My brain seems to make everything linear. I like to imagine the first strum of an electric guitar as sharp mountains, right side up and upside down, exploding from a flat line of silence. But these mountains are fuzzy in their sharpness- the electricity coursing up their slopes and blurring the lines with a zzzpt zzpt sound. Electric guitar is fuzzy mountains growing from both sides of a line forever running forward, relentless like time.) There is this song by The Antlers that I like to listen to on Sunday afternoons.
(The second dimension is a square. Three minutes and twenty-six seconds is such a small square of time to show someone your two inches of ivory carving, your tiny window of the world. Do you really have a moment to spare for a drawn out opening, for a shimmering bell to clatter twice and fade into the air while everyone waits for the fuzzy mountains? Why do we always wait for the fuzzy mountains?) It's a pretty short song- like three minutes or something.
(Multiply it three times by itself and it becomes cubed. The bass pounds through the song, throwing up rocks and dirt as it plows its way through the fuzzy mountains. I watch it cutting through and eating away the line that the mountains perch and hang from. I thought the bass was supposed to be supportive rather than destructive? Perhaps The Antlers thought they were pretty clever, throwing in the giantess of a bass halfway through the song to add another "dimension", give that listener some excitement. I don't really buy it.) But it is nice music to do the dishes to.
(Time is a line and the fourth dimension at the same time.) Maybe I'll download their whole album sometime.

September Sixth

There was an expression I could never quite shake out of my head after I heard it. The same image still comes to my mind after a dozen years of considering this silly little figure of speech and when some friends came to the apartment, high on psychedelics, it seemed odd that I should again be reminded of a farm setting, the smell of manure and the sound of thick cream bubbling on hard dry hay.
There were two girls and they sobbed as they held each other on my living room floor. Everyone else was on the couch watching Speed Racer with the TV volume down and the stereo volume up wondering if they should keep pretending nothing odd was happening below them.
There's no use crying over spilled milk. I looked their distorted faces as one girl expressed how no body else understood, that she never was good enough to be a ballerina and no one will ever know what my pain was except for you Letica and Letica nods with pain and understanding in her eyes.
I turned back to the movie. The best thing about Speed Racer is that I can follow just the wildly colorful images and quick cutting while my thoughts take shape around things like Keats' opium trances or what the call of Cthulu actually sounds like or figures of speech that first struck me in childhood and have stayed with me since.
The first reaction I had to the idiom in question was why not? Why shouldn't I cry if I spill some milk on the ground? Remember Fox and the Hound when Todd makes the cow spill the bucket of milk over and the grandma got mad at him? I might have cried if I were Todd. But I suppose as I got a little older it became clear that not crying over spilled milk because we had gotten in trouble for it wasn't quite the issue. It makes sense to not worry over things that are past et cetera, et cetera, and even if I get a pastoral image in mind when I hear the phrase, thanks largely to the aforementioned movie, I get the sense of what that piece of speech is used for.
I look back at my friends. They were spilling over all over my floor about things gone and pasts unrealized, the milk, as it were, streaming down their faces and out of their noses. And as Emile Hirsch flew across the screen in the Mach 5 I realized that I've never really lost that sense of rebellion when it comes to crying over spilled milk. Why shouldn't I cry? There is something beautiful and real about the artist's life unrealized, the loss of something important, irretrievable, like milk seeping into dirty hay. My stomach coiled a little uncomfortably as I remember the embarrassment I had felt for my friends on the floor because there is nothing dishonorable in feeling the pain of loss and it is so much better when you can share the feeling with friends.

September First

It is almost easy to imagine Georges Lemaître gazing from his Bible into the heavens and giving a nod to the old understanding that he cannot account for existence and then suddenly, like a flash of car lights illuminating a dark room of his mind, seeing the truth of reality.

On miles of white salty floors under a velvet sky that seemed to be falling slowly, like an immense tarp punctured with stars, a small group of twenty something year olds walked half drunkenly towards distant highway lights. Inside a mind the sky keeps falling, slowly spiraling, dropping down to the white salt and then gently splitting vertically and parting to present the white empty stage, set for the first act.

One girl closes her eyes. Walking with eyes closed is no danger out here, here there is nothing, and yet there could be anything... And the wind on her face feels like currants of water and the weighty sky settles on her as the weight of the ocean. The salt in her nose is the salty water she breathes and she reaches out her hands to brush against seaweed. Her mind's eyes open and she sees ripples of colorful bodies and shimmers of slithering tails, the pulse of the ocean rocking the plants into a drowsy dance but not quite to sleep.
A boy closes his eyes. There was a time, in a dream, when the cool air pushed up his limbs and belly and there was a sensation that the weight of hours was lifted, that really the only hindrance to his flight was the illusion of time, which, he remembered, is an illusion out here. And as he remembered, the heavy air lifted his hair and lifted his navel. He extended his arms far out in front of him and sailed into a milk white consciousness.