excerpts from a travel-notebook

[. . .]
I'd love for all of those moments to be ours.

---

The M-Sp Airport carpet looks like chickens have traced their oddly shaped feet in wild tracks throughout the room. Interspersed with taupe lines that look like combs of sound waves -- sound shocks -- that span from one end to the next. I feel like I've been here before. I feel like I've said all of this, already. Only one boring world would punctuate itself with a color like taupe.

---

There's something about C that makes me want to walk faster -- that makes me want to immerse myself into endless cups of coffee -- of conversation -- that makes me want to forget myself in a fog of cigarette smoke and noise. There's something about this place that quiets the voices in my head.

---

My flight arrived almost two hours ago.

At the airport waiting again -- when all I want to do is move -- calm this sudden urge to run and hear my own voice louder than it needs to be. There's a conflict in the moments here that spins me into and out of the difference between the real and the imagined. As if I'm that girl I see in the mirror -- but when pinched -- I'd never feel the sting. I've no bags to claim and there's no cab ride to deliver me home.

out of the office

updates as time permits.
be well.

cribbed from an email message to a dear friend

when i was heading home for the day, tired and weary from being awake for too long talking or listening to someone else talk about books -- or having my head in a book -- and being kept alert only through chemical means that drip slowly in brown liquid blobs from a machine that eats my money -- i saw a small brownish red butterfly on a lilac colored flower. i only saw it for an instant as the wind blew my hair across my eyes and i became distracted again by those brief irritating moments that fill up the living of life. but it was real and wonderful and alive -- the way it stayed poised on the tip of the flower's head -- even against the strong mid-western winds -- and it reminded me that it's okay to hold on to even the things that i can't see and that are sometimes hard to believe in.

coated copper alloy

a man asked me to marry him
just now
right in front of the coffee maker
he gave me a nickel
from his right front pocket
before we exchanged names

schemas and other error checkers

right now, all i am capable of doing is parsing this life out into moments
in this one
i am tired
generally unwell
not fit
restless
cold
in this one
i am without you

barewalls

maybe it was all the cold medication
or the copious lack of sleep
but suddenly i wanted to cover my walls with rossetti's women
and to relearn the world in italian

disappearing acts

my fingers haven't been hitting the keys lately
been caught up in a cold that i can't seem to shake
not even under constant doses of orange juice (laced with vodka)
and if you're wondering whose stolen my eyes
well
there's one real elusive answer to that question
they'll arrive back shortly
i've no doubt
and no fear

just now
i want words
and so i fall headlong into first collins
then paz
let the translated tongue linger first in my head
then breathe them into sounds in the permadusk colors of this
blue tinged room
words are always never enough
to bridge the gap between meaning
and time

i'm not sure when i stopped wanting to tell you all of my secrets
and when i realized that i didn't know what to do
next

things that aren't humanly possible

i thank god for the space that exists between the words any and more
in the process of looking for what i might find at the end of the phrase
exceedingly drunk
but somehow not quite getting there
no matter the quantities of cold vodka
orange juice
there's a whole city full of stumbling drunk people rambling around
just outside the screens of these open windows
they move between sips
as i try to forget
each and every one
tonight the air is full of crisp cool contentment
as if the ocean were a blanket
like the lies i tell myself to sleep better at night

what i've done while trying to read the remaining 200 pages of this novel
eaten three cookies
contemplated making yet another coffee
stood on one (alternating) leg in my living room
turned aprox 100 pages without actually reading any of them
realized that not everyone has heard of walt whitman
and that rotterdam really does look beautiful

while i was brushing my teeth
i tried to write something in my head about how loving you must be like eating cotton-candy
the way it dissolves on the tongue
replaced again by more greedy handfuls

but the idea sounded better
with a mouth full of warm water and tangerine-tinged-mint paste

instead, i sat down and wondered what the sound of this word might taste like
and what it might feel like going down
i thought about the winks, then couldn't stop smiling
i decided to move to rotterdam

sometimes i wonder if i've sealed myself on the inside of too many envelopes. if everything there ever was exists between the feathery folds of paper. the margins all restuck. a consequence of humidity and time. evidences only that there's been something waiting to come apart. to be ripped at the seams like a half worn hem. maybe i've gotten drunk one too many times over piles of laundry and bills and mental lists of my inefficacies. flirted shamelessly with too many men in the dark next to trash bins. thinking more about the way broken bottles glint like water under harsh parking lamps. that what i become is only some memory that i've created with text across a page or words across a wire. each meant to press themselves into a space that won't fit. like a thumb heavy against a palm. every day it all becomes a little less real. your hands. the internal combustion engine. what it takes to bake a cake.

words don't make poetry in my head any more.
my head doesn't take them and make them move.
but, sometimes, loving you, in those caught unexpected moments
still feels like i've got to stop and hold my breath

screw boys

_i_ want this
link c/o NewMexiKen

when the phone rings and you know the news will make or break you

it's been over a year
now
that she's been cancer free

it wasn't even quite noon

and i was already in trouble for searching around in his balls

the new distance measurement

unlimited kissing range

i'm all in pieces
pretending to get work done
listening to james taylor
far too loudly
this might be the first time in my life that i've wished i knew how to make beautiful music with my fingers

i meant to click something else

but i accidentally visited scott's blue.pencil
there's references to comics and the super hero
word

what i want right now

candy
something sticky sweet
like caramel--
rich smooth chocolate--
smothering--
melted in warm milk
slow guilty draughts
tongue numb from the taste

sometimes i wonder if you might think it strange for me to admit that i am fascinated by you
you and the words that i find--
inhabit--
forgive.
or that i've often tried to leave clues here
behind
so that you'd know the
you of you
really does mean
you