friday pie

split pea soup
pea soup split
shake your leg
shake your hip
mango
soda
bubble
sip
warm-ish shower
take a dip

construct

just a bit of philosophy

South of my Specific

“Just one seat, please” I told him, and slipped my plastic student id card under the box office glass. $20 later (perhaps the best way to spend such an amount) and I’d rented myself a magical piece of real estate – the only sort of space that brings the world to you. Perched like a bird up on the balcony, it was three hours of song and three hours of feet tapping and three hours of rocking back and forth with arms wrapped tight because the swell of the music was almost too much to bear sometimes. Bali Hai always does it – I don’t know how it couldn’t. all of them.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81NROmUb7o0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMO72_TF9JY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1qpQb11YWc

I can’t quite explain it, but I was very far away from New York tonight.

talking

A:“So, there’s this post-it note.”
B: “Right, a post-it.”
A: “And I posted the post-it on the left bedpost of my bed.”
B: “Wait, the left when you’re looking at the bedposts from the edge of the bed, or the left when you’re lying flat on your back and looking at the ceiling?”
A: “The left when I’m looking at the ceiling.”
B: “Okay.”
A: “So I posted the post-it. And that was that.”
B: “What do you mean that was that?”
A: “Now it just sits there and sometimes when I fall asleep I think about how neon pink and bright it is but it’s dark so I still can’t see it. And that makes me calm. Because no matter what I just won’t see it.”
B: “It just sits there? No writing?”
A: “No writing. Just a post-it. I’m going to put another one up tomorrow. It will be green.”
B: “How many will you put up?”
A: “Oh, I don’t know, maybe a thousand.”
B: “A thousand? Really?”
A: “Really – then it will always be bright at night. Bright and dark.”
B: “Bright and dark.”

---

C: “How do you feel about this room? I think it’s too big.”
E: “Big? It could hardly fit a dinner party of eight. I don’t care if the ceilings are high, it’s cramped.”
C: “I don’t know. I think the smaller the space the bigger it feels.”
E: “What the hell are you talking about? Honestly, you couldn’t fit a couch in here if you didn’t turn it vertical.”
C: “I don’t know why it’s so hard for you to understand, it’s simple. The more space you have inside the smaller it makes the outside feel. I get lost inside when it’s cavernous. I prefer to know that there’s a bigger place to go to next.”
E: “Really, that’s absurd. I’d feel trapped if I was stuck in an itty bitty room for an hour.”
C: “Yes, but the size of the room isn’t really about the room. It’s about the size of the space inside it.”
E: “We have another house to look at – c’mon.”
C: “Just wait a moment.”

i once

I once thought this:
the rapture of velociraptors may scatter chapters as horse hooves clatter
and babies lick their baking batter
and brilliant rays of sun sky shatter
and time does flips from all the rafters
while teeth in winter always chatter and
when awake at night thoughts patter
down the hall
sleep wanders after

I once thought this:
Tupperware and plastic wrap have nothing on my memory.
If you want your mother’s cookies to stay fresh just open up my brain and insert those buttery disks.

I once thought this:
In and out, dreams of dark and fluid light, what would happen if you forget to hold me tight?
Tight, me hold, to forget you, if happen will, what light fluid and dark of dreams. Out and in.

I once thought this:
On the last day of everything I was awoken by an angel screaming, flapping about my room, OR a mouse who I watched contemplate his life and death. Both had tumbled through my open window out from the moist green morning grey, and into my 6:20 slumber.

I once thought this:
everything is utterly simple

I once thought this:
everything is very complicated

I once thought this:
today on the subway a tall man with sun roughed skin and legs bent at sharp angles of knees held a baby as though it were love itself. The baby was small and its skin was the pink of naievity and its hair was soft and dark. Its eyes were closed and it slept in the man’s wide hands – the head in the right and the back/bottom in the left. The man held the baby in front of him – his arms outstretched and his fingers moving ever so lightly in small twitching motions. The man stared at the baby, and the baby swayed in the cradle of the subway in the bowels of the city in the arms of its father.

I once thought this:
almost everything can be very funny

syncopated (thunder) clap

sometimes ears can be blessed things.
i dressed my salad with some NPR.

(kitchen sink: quinoa, rice vinegar, tofu, jalapeno pepper, onions, soy sauce, sesame seeds, lime, carrots, cucumbers, beautiful red pepper, romaine lettuce)

highly recommended sound finds:
Zee Avi
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xy0mel38MVk&feature=channel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0rafi5CG5M&NR=1&feature=fvwp

additionally, when a woman cries publicly about a chameleon, i know that the sun will rise again.

blue grass

i once dreamed of a color beyond the colors and when i woke up, I found it peeking out from behind my window, spiraling through the threads in my blanket and lifting off in light winds from the sound of your voice. the menagerie of my mind is full of bright winged birds, and with each trill of their melodies the color seeps deeper and deeper into the trees, the dirt, my veins. I examine my fingers closely, checking for the hue, keeping vigilante watch for the day when it will bubble up to the surface, spilling out through my fingernails and smearing brilliant vibrancy across the hem of my dress. A freckle on my foot looks a little darker this afternoon than it did last week.

the depth of it

if ever I was certain of anything

tomorrow

sweep me up with the dust and the pennies and those scraps of thoughts of scraps upon the floor

even strangers' eyes

undone

hot heat

Three little girls were double dutching in the shade of the old grocery’s awning. The yellow lettering on the rain weathered cloth used to read JOE’S EATS but by now it just said O ATS. The heat was languid that day – swimming softly through itself, stirring its thickness in the air that barely moved. Beads of sweat collected on the white collar of the littlest girl’s shirt. She was holding one end of the ropes and couldn’t let go to wipe her brow. Each time she made the ropes arch like a cat’s tense back, her tight black braids would swing and catch the sweat up in their strands, but never enough to prevent her from feeling damp.

The other two girls were taller, and that meant the littlest had to hold her hands high to keep the ropes even. The muscles tensed in her thin brown arms and she furrowed her eyebrows with concentration as she fought to keep them raised. She didn’t normally rope with the big girls and she was determined to stay.

Gabriel watched the girls from inside JOE’S. With his nose pressed against the cool glass window next to the sweets freezer, he peered out into the street and squinted to see through the quivering bands of heat. He had an ice cream bar in his left hand, and it slowly dripped onto the overturned tomato crate on which he stood. His once blue laces were caked with dust and mud and grass and his heels were out of the backs of his shoes. When the days got hot he never liked to put them on fully – he always imagined that his feet felt like he did when he got stuck in his turtlenecks. He imagined they would be happier this way.

The girls sang the song they always sang when the pavement got hot. None of the three could remember who they learned it from, and if you asked Gabriel – who always watched but never jumped – it was a tropical bird who first taught it to them. The bird had flown down the avenue one day in a blur of yellow and fierce orange, sang its song, and never came back.

The ice cream bar was almost completely a puddle at Gabriel’s feet when Old Missus Thomas shuffled into the store, sounding like softshoe tap dances on sand. She was dragging her old pooch behind her and she had to hold the door open for a few moments before she could yank him inside. With the door open, the sound of the ropes slapping street inched into the store, along with the song of the three girls. In three perfect and small voices they sang

Sasparilla, old vanilla, spice the corn and fluff the pilla
tickle toes and flower nose and cheat when playing dominoes
kiss me once
and kiss me twice
then hold my hand – don’t kiss me thrice!
The world is made of cats and mice
cats and mice
cats and mice

The old pooch finally crossed the threshold and the bell dinged as the door swung shut. Gabriel removed his nose from the glass and extended his hand towards the old pooch. The dog wriggled its nose and then moved towards Gabriel. He licked the ice cream off his hand, and the tickle of his tongue made Gabriel giggle. He pulled the dog close and whispered into its ear, “Sasparilla, old vanilla…”

a small quiet

A shallow pool of muddy coffee sits cold on the bottom of the cup. Her hand circles the white of the mug in an absent sort of embrace – fingers loose and longing. A book is open on the dark, riveted wood of the table and her feet are crossed and tucked beneath the chair. Her eyes move slowly across the page in a familiar military rhythm of left right left right, so smoothly that the words become a stream of black, splashing ink carelessly as it runs up against the end of a sentence. She doesn’t mind the soggy page.

There is a baby boy near her. The tiny one sits in the lap of a man at the table to the right. His light brown beard is long and thick, and his eyes glimmer brightly beneath perfectly symmetrical eyebrows. He holds his son beneath the armpits and bounces him lightly on one knobby knee. The boy wriggles and squeals and lifts his pale, jam covered hands into the air.

The river of ink now increases its speed. It rushes across chapters, sinking into the dip of the book’s center and seeping onto the table. It pools around the white mug and the girl leans forward to dip the end of one of her curls into the perfect black. It comes out wet, the ink spiraling, creeping, climbing up and up. She straightens the curl with her right hand and guides the ends of the strand along the palm of her left.

It tickles like that time the boy whispered a secret into her ear on the grass in the shade of the park, when his hand brushed carelessly across the nape of her neck, when she woke up with him and the cool pale morning sun touched her cheek.

The ink begins to drip on the floor, splattering her brown sandals and adding dark freckles to her toes. She closes the book, and stands up. As she walks out of the café into the afternoon heat, she leaves a trail of black footprints, each a million muddy unspoken words.

cat is hat

there is a man who walks the streets with a cat on his head.
he is grumpy.
the cat is skilled at balancing.

dapples

A tic crawled slowly across the fore of the deer’s right ear, along the thin pink skin and across the map of veins just visible beneath the surface. As the rustling leaves cast dark shadows into the valleys of the ear, the tic climbed over the edge and began its descent into thickly bristled hair. The deer’s ear twitched slightly, then stopped. His eyes were trailing the figures just above him on the hill. There were two girls and two boys, their bodies seeming to levitate from the angle of the deer’s crouch. They were perched on a rock, limbs folded, eyes seeking in the chaotic decoupage of the forest. Their laughter rang through the trees, skimming along the ridges of the bark and launching off again to burrow deep into the dirt below. The trees stood up a little bit straighter, it seemed to the deer. It was like rain had just fallen.

The earth was cool and covered with leaves. It smelled like mushrooms and the sweat of worms as they began to wriggle their way towards the spots in the dirt where the laughter had hit. The deer watched a plant sprout rise, slowly but steadily up through a spot where a high giggle had lodged in the dirt. A bright yellow bird landed on the lowest branch of a nearby tree and stared at the baby plant.

More laughter fell, tossed across the forest like seeds blown from a dandelion puff. It landed in clumps of voices and in single notes, sprouting flowers and color and life. The deer watched the four figures as they opened their mouths and tilted their heads – eyes scrunching with mirth and their bodies swaying in slow rhythms of ease. The deer remained low to the ground, the earth giving birth around him. When the tallest of the four figures stood to stretch long legs and crunch the leaves that lay slumbering on the ground below him, the deer fled.