My Child

Sits in a library in the afternoon.
I'm away, maybe even busy,
And he drags his fingers across
The spines of the book
Like he's playing a xylophone.
He smells the old wood
The pulpy cheese scent
Mixed with the bitter ink
The two fermenting each other
In their closeness for years
As he looks for the oldest book
He can find.
But he stops.
This may have never happened
I wouldn't know if it had.
I wasn't there.
When he presses his cheek on the
Linoleum table top
And traces an invisible pattern
That only he could imagine
As he falls asleep,
His temple fusing with the table.
I come back for a moment
In his darkness
Just to make sure he's still there.

"JK Rowling"

JK Rowling
Looked at cows
And created Harry Potter.
I look at my toaster
And don't even know if it's plugged in.

Later

An acorn drops from the apex of some tree
And it falls on the soft branches
Still light from spring.
The leaves still have their fuzz,
Invisible but there, like the hair on my temples,
Like a hiding peach.
The spring was so late the ducks haven't grown
They're small like marbles, rolling on the waves,
Smoothing their feathers with oil as they shake their bills.
The weeds greet and sprawl across the surface
Sleeping on the tops like sinewy lilies.
I'll write this all in later.
The balls of my feet heat up over the hill
And as I walk upwards I can see over the bridge
The clouds, polished smooth from the wind,
Glassy almost, preened for a perfect moment.
And I'll write this all in later
Unless I've forgotten.

"Our True Nature is Happiness

Like the iterations of needles
On the edge of a pine.
Humans are meant to be happy
And this is their state."
I may be just a depression
In this patchwork of joy
That all humans say they should feel
But what does that make me?
Bliss is the purest form of happiness
Like pure coconut oil,
Too nourishing, too rich for skin,
Lipids too long for our cells to understand.
And yet we marinate ourselves in it
As if one day our pores will say
"Oh yes, this is what we needed
All along." But cells know best.
They know what they are
When we lie
Why we do it.
And so the oil stays on the surface,
Shallow and slimy, slippery and thick
With fat.

In Memoriam

The hill by my house is steep and smooth
And sometimes when it's damp out
The tiny grooves on my tires fail
On my elderly car
And it stalls. I start it up again
Looking up at the street lights
Curved like ribs on a snake
As if the road were its spinal cord.
Each lane line is a vertebrae
And its head is where I'm going.
I like my description of my tires
Of the lay of the highway
Of the sad state of my car
With a rusted chassis
Brittle as silver leaf in a tapestry thread
And I wonder, "where have I been?"
What has taken me so long?

My car purrs as I let some tears out
And I stroke the dashboard, telling it
"This won't happen again."
On the radio I listen to a story of a boy
Who remembers the only time his mother held him
Because he only pretended to sleep.
I've never held my writing.
I've never held the weight of a rusty sedan.
I've never even held everything that I could say.
Something explodes in my brain, spontaneously
Like fuel in an engine,
And off I go.

journal 10/10

oh look i just wrote something else! all that transcribing a journal made me want to write another one, so i just did.

hi dad, i know you're reading this, so i'd like to say that some of this is fiction and some is not.

10/10
Thursdays was date night. Edija and I would go to the Denny's on Riverside and Franklin, but we wouldn't go alone. TJ had to come along to dramatize anything that could happen. He was like a little bard, spewing abstract crap about what we were doing.

But we wouldn't eat at the Denny's. In fact, we wouldn't even go inside. We'd just park in the lot and walk across the street to the Sinclair station first. TJ would go inside and buy eggs because he was Hmong and most of the neighborhood was Hmong, so he wouldn't stand out. I looked like a boy then. I wonder if Edija was actually gay because he hated me when I grew my hair out that winter. I think we broke up over it.

Edija had gray-blue hair at that point, I think. It made him look like Anderson Cooper. We were just too obvious. So TJ bought the eggs.

I have no idea why we did this, but one day when we were driving around the neighborhood, Edija pulled over and said, "Dude, let's go egg Denny's."

And so we did. First it was one egg carton, then three, and finally we would watch TJ balance a tower of egg crates as he hobbled towards us. And then we'd find our favorite brown brick side and start throwing.

I swear when we did this we weren't high or anything. Like I said I don't know why we did any of it. Crazy unwashed people would honk at us as they drove past, leaning out their windows and cheering us on. To them we must have been a blank symbol of anything they were mad at. Some would say "Bush knocked down the towers!" or "Death to corporations!" or "Make abortion a health right!" We'd wave at them and keep throwing eggs. I'm glad it made someone happy.

9/26 journal

if froid and samuel were in a rom com, this would have been a thing. doesn't take a genius to decide who is who.

LANGUAGE DISCLAIMER: this is made with english. sometimes english drops the f-bomb when you encounter someone you hate.

9/26
You're at the ramen stand right by the quad. That ramen place is the only worthwhile place to eat at around here. How dare you. I haven't eaten or slept in two days, all because of the class you're the TA for, that has taken upon itself to become my new lifestyle. How dare you. Look at you, all well-rested and eager to get your huge bowl of miso buckwheat ramen. If only you got some sort of rabid food poisoning and you had to spend two days not sleeping or eating. How about YOU take on that lifestyle.

How am I, you ask? What do you think you can hide behind your schadenfreude, behind some sort of well-worn politeness? Fuck you, I just want my ramen to go so I can watch my face bloat up from the MSG and sodium in peace. YOUR face doesn't bloat up, doesn't it? That's because you have the metabolism of an ecstasy-riddled baby squirrel.

Have I written a response paper to the poem you published, you ask? No. I've just been sitting on my ass for two days trying to escape and join a Colombian drug cartel so I can give you some cocaine laced with dishwasher soap and watch you go into shock.

Why am I just staring at you, you ask? Sorry, I've just not slept in a while. Thats all. See you in class later. Enjoy your ramen.

Fucker.