April 3: The Spiders of Iron Roads and the Garbage I Walk On

Everyone cheered. Really, that’s how it happened. I don’t quite remember what anecdote I was reciting or creating for the first time, but it undoubtedly ended with a moment of solemn repose followed by a jarring torrent of praise for my work. I, of course, sidestepped it and humbly credited the whole verbal excursion to the One Poet Storyteller I am still not convinced is still alive somewhere out there, but I tried my best to not let it overfill me. I’ve been overfilled before. It’s a sadsadsad state to achieve. You think you’re going to finally earn fulfillment—full fill(ment)—and the token you end up with in the quavering, still desiring palm of your hand simply says You’ve done it. Put this on. You’ve done it. It’s over. But like Bauby’s Diving Bell, you can’t physically strap on the emboldened crown you want everyone to see. You’re immobile but it’s the line you painted long ago, before you set out on the iron road that spilled over the horizon, destined to be Murakami’s Strongest Fifteen Year Old Ever and the small heat between all of Hers’ legs. So try not to smile too hard when you think of the pop-up trophies formed like stalagmites along the road in the Cave of the Sky, because there are plenty of intricate webs strung between each and a lot of garbage tearing them apart, finally crunching underneath the slippery soles of today’s new shoes. And look! You can see my new shoes.  

April 2: Days Are When

I’ll keep this short: The most pathetic

time I’ve had

was when I entombed hours in pity. There’s an idea: time I’ve had.

I’ve had so much time so far, yet all I’ve really hunted

and gathered is now. I’ll keep this short:

Now Is a Filter at the end of the Tunnel of the Future’s stream,

filtering out little particles that stay with us and wear down

before being eroded and passing

through to the Pool of the Past. So don’t really try

and ever think you can live in the fictional Stream of Now—it’s not real.

Imagine how hard is must be for a filter to pretend to be a fish!

April 1: He Could Still Be Right in Romanticizing Smoldering Paper

I’ve been thinking a lot about the trite adages that I call pollution to the way we, as you and me and anyone else who these words are cared for by, frame the world. Like neat little pictures laminated and clipped and bound to become Our Book of Thought of sorts, I resign to sigh and admit that we have really rounded up the cattle of meaning, meaning the lenses I’ve become accustomed to and grown too large for—even this! I haven’t grown, just changed, again like a lens, and now I see things a little differently, but I’m really much the same and I haven’t outgrown my old corrections—are found fresh daily for others. I drift into dichotomies, somehow believing without a foundation for belief that in this world we either have glasses or we don’t, but the truth of this limited analogy could be somewhere here: you don’t know of my old revelations drying with the rest of my neglected laundry, and I will really never be able to distinguish between your old, shed perspectives and the delicate under garments you routinely pin up beside them. One of them that will draw me to linger a little longer than I should, though, and I sort of wonder if that’s something I will ever outgrow, or if that’s just a pane, too.