July 11th, 2014

And right before I woke up my father appeared and said
come with me and I did and he was showing me something
in a house, a door, perhaps work he had done, but before
we walked through the door he looked at me with such
tenderness and love that in waking life I had only dreamed
of and said, I love you so damn much, and hugged me in the
way that only exists between fathers and daughter. It was full
of approval, validation, and protection. He shook with sobs
and I was nervous, a blossoming flower in his arms, but not
quite ready to discuss everything that had gone wrong in our
relationship or his life. I cried too, uncomfortably, but
then we pulled apart and he was no longer crying and we were
about to continue on through the door when I woke smiling. It
took me several seconds to remember that he was dead.


July 10th, 2014

Slowly, slowly, things fall into place. I ran two days in a row.
I met the man who once passed me a microphone at a panel
discussion. This same man gives me hope for the future of
humanity. I am writing again. At least, I am committing these
words to this page. We'll see when the "writing" begins again.
I read tonight, to a room full of people who maybe understood
60% of what I said; the room was too small for expanding nuances.
The moon was lovely tonight and as I ran around a corner I
startled a couple who had been making out on a park bench.
At the sight of me they stood. I outlived them and used their
bench for arm presses. now I am falling asleep as I try to offer
my siblings as full a hope as I can I drift what was I trying to do
for my siblings in that dream in the shallow end of sleep? All i
understood is that it was kind. And then sleep came.



June 30th, 2014

Everything smelled like bikram yoga.
Everything smelled like bikram yoga
and noxzema and the wine that had
spilled on the light pink sheet turning
it to the bruised color of a sky that
clears of clouds just after sunset. These
are the days we live within and count
as our own, and are our own alone in the
kind of solitary that grows plants. A deep
dirt kind of solitary, a deeper practice, a
deeper heat. I grew familiar with the
deeper heat and the feeling of blood
buzzing through pathways, tingling in the
tips of things, moving always onward and through. 


June 23rd, 2014

Clearing out the space was like
lugging your dead body from a
grave, its weight catching on the
soft dark of dirt. These things
are never as they seem, like when
we climbed to the top of the mountain
to scatter your ashes and it was
raining and we hid in the fog from the
other hikers, from the gaze of children
and their tourist parents. Nothing was
soft and forgiving and the rain fell
sharp and your ashes, they stuck to the
rocks as we tried to let them out, tried to return
you to a place you had loved and conquered. 


June 19th, 2014

He will write today. His eyes don't focus on things 

before him but rather the words he will write and 

all the images they stand as symbol for. His eyes. 

They are a negotiation of smoke and water as a 

storm over a sea and maybe there is, though we 

do not speak of it often, sadness as well. Here is 

where image and word meet, even before he draws 

his pen along the lines. How many times have I sat 

with him and watched this, a long net patiently dragged 

along sand through gray water to bring up what is many 

miles beneath and then the sorting through trash and 

treasure? He is Ahab. Also he is Jonah. He is the 

striving and the silence, the tautness of a line and 

the life on the other end.

June 15th, 2014

Dear Dad, 

A stranger was in my bed last night. 

It wasn't on purpose, not really anyway, 

and the day is perfect and the sun is out

and if you were alive you would be 

browning in it, your skin a deep leather

crossed with a few wrinkles and many 

hairs. You would yawn a growl of a

yawn, as a bear, and you would be so 

pleased with yourself, sweat and oil

dripping from your bald forehead. 

I feel the fullness of regret, but also
the numbness that always follows it.
I will let the sun melt these layers.


June 8th, 2014

Jamie said there are always sports all the time if you want to find them
because his child, my cousin, is playing a sport that strikes me as
unseasonal, though I know very little of these things, and in truth,
wish to know even less than I do. This is constructed around just a note
from that day, June 8th, and I have no memory of why this was important.
The rest of the note reads: 
Something said on the porch
bukowski
I can not hope to unfold these folded notes that hole some wisdom or at
least narrative from the day, but I do know that "something said on the
porch" is an unintentionally lovely line and evokes a feeling, if not a memory,
that is true of this day. Something is always being said on the porch, and
very often, these things being said relate to Bukowski, and very often,
these things being said lance wounds.


 June 7th, 2014

There's still weight which won't seem to come off I
say to myself every single time I look in the mirror, as
if the layer of fat on my hips and belly had a stubborn
mind of its own and a stake in staying attached to me. The
reason it isn't coming off is because too often in the months
from last June to this one I held myself under covers rather
than scraping my knees tripping during a night run. Too
many times I said, well, why not another drink? Why not
this food? And now the fat on my body seems so other
to me, so foreign, that I speak to it in a passive aggressive
tone through my reflection. It doesn't want to leave because
I have prepared a home for it. It has bonded to my bone.
No one was ever really afraid of failure, rather, we're not
sure we deserve success.

June 1st, 2014

Dream/porch/sun/shopping

May 31st, 2014

disappointment/sparing

May 30th, 2014

Tulip

May 29th, 2014

Talent show

May 28th, 2014

Dream