The Future

Men get to be a mixture of the charming mannerisms of the women they have known"-F. Scott Fitzgerald

Pacific

All parts should go together without forcing. Therefore, if you can't get them together, there must be a reason. By all means, do not use a hammer. -IBM maintenance manual, 1925

Ever second spatters the skull with wasted electrodes.

the past discharged

White Bricks and Empty Chairs

“I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, It's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, And that enables you to laugh at life's realities.” - Dr. Seuss

A clubhouse of coalescing urges. Dirty magazines gradually define themselves, spine bent on the floor.

Rising from still images to the wilderness of sound and motion; the first hairs rise from strange crevasses, from smooth skin.

The binding of vision and feeling, the mismatched blocks of reality and imagination pressed together in a primal wiggle.

Purgatory as Paradise

The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door...-Fredric Brown

But there are rooms that are not supposed to be stepped in. clean walls rounded, steel and rope barriers. Celebrated for their stillness, their ability to endure, to hold the scrap-metal of Man close-fisted against his own tumbling mass.

I Keep Talking About Going North

How those fires burned that are no longer, how the weather worsened, how the shadow of the seagull vanished without a trace. Was it the end of a season, the end of a life? Was it so long ago it seems it might never have been? What is it in us that lives in the past and longs for the future, or lives in the future and longs for the past? And what does it matter when light enters the room where a child sleeps and the waking mother, opening her eyes, wishes more than anything to be unwakened by what she cannot name?

-Mark Strand

You stand at the table shuffling papers, and fail to notice dropping something

You move with the papers in hand and the thing remains still

You realize the thing is gone but you are already gone as well

You search for it in the place where you last remember having it

You never find it, and don’t really think about after a while

My house is a mess and

The ants move with purpose

Around the trashcans

And I sometimes kick them into chaos

Depending on my mood

But mostly I forget they are there

We Spent an Eternity Talking about the Past

Whether in glass or sand or skin

The bullet must land

It will not discharge into nothingness

but raindrop back to earth

like metal bird-shit

I don’t love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz,

or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:

I love you as one loves certain obscure things,

secretly, between the shadow and the soul

- Pablo Neruda

Gold Coin Chocolate

And then we cowards

who loved the whispering

evening, the houses,

the paths by the river,

the dirty red lights

of those places, the sweet

soundless sorrow—

we reached our hands out

toward the living chain

in silence, but our heart

startled us with blood,

and no more sweetness then,

no more losing ourselves

on the path by the river—

no longer slaves, we knew

we were alone and alive.

-Cesare Pavese

a youth pastor once told me that

in heaven,

there is the unimaginable

this profoundness lies in our inability to fathom

what hides behind gods will.

he offered to baptize us in the ocean

wash the skin of sin

for those

the new members,

who wanted to go there

but i was too embarrassed

that noone else went forth

to accept the rebirth

so i chose eternal damnation

rather than be noticed