between the devil and the deep blue sea

i was superstitious once. it was late, i couldn't see.
i slipped myself something
a little hot something
now i crack bones and hands like so many binder clips.

i don't like running my bare feet over painted floorboards
warped with spilled beer and careless staggered fingerprints.
i don't like fingerprints.

running down the pull string you left hanging
the knob and tube tightening the brown softwoods in my craggy attic.
i hit my head on it again.

you can touch all the corners
and never make a square.
i know.
i watched you.

i'd give you back two fingers if you'd shake my hand.
but that wealth
is out the window and down the street .

touch nothing and remain
as empty as the eyes you throw at me.
and i'll still ask you to look.

i'll still turn out the light.

ID [old]

world rolls sticky facts and sad forlorn drifting thoughts.
headaches brew lack of thought
tired ineffective action translates into ineffectual, disconnected misrepresented moments.
lost moments cannot be stitched together.
if you don't know who you are, you can't see the world happening to you.
headaches aside, you will untether and fail to see the smiles and snuggles and opportunity of daily life.
wake up!
a million little gods, wake up and know yourself!

the unknowable you

Life is the greatest tragedy. But let's get back to this in a moment.

I spend many days looking into my head, as if I had eyes in the back of my eyeballs. Beyond the blue-red lace that connects the visual to the cerebral, I see more than stars. If I look hard enough, reach deep enough into the mush and tumble of my bumbling brain, I find everything ever.

This should hardly be a surprise. Everything I have ever heard, said, or thought is bouncing around in there somewhere, but these facts and memories are tangled up with the sharpest (and physically weakest) recording I have - that of my eyes. And with this jumbled, transmuted data I build expansive places I cannot begin to express to anyone. But maybe I should start.

The finest point of human civilization has to be communication - the ability to agree on a common meaning for visual and aural expression. But this understanding is rooted in each individual experience, and as such cannot begin to arrive at a precise meeting point. Somewhere at the intersection of communication and observation is where my imagination begins and ends. And a crucial part of my imagination is my understanding of place, specifically the place I am and the place I dream about.

In communicating this very dynamic, fluid place that exists in my head, I help create hundreds of new, unknowable places in the imaginations of others. For example, I take my physical experience of Petrin Park in Prague, and I blend in my love for and intense knowledge of Kansas City, along with my appreciation for complicated, impossible Lebbeus Woods type constructions and Terry Gilliam fantasy dystopias, and populate it with people I have known, pretended to know, or generated to fill in some dream narrative gap that I still don't understand. And this place is very real to me - at least, it is to that bumbling brain behind my eyes. But each description I offer of it will only draw on someone else's understanding and observations of such things as Kansas City, Terry Gilliam, industrial decay, and civic majesty. I find this fascinating - that a place so tangible to me becomes something else each time I describe it.

So how do I communicate it? Do I write stories about the inhabitants? Do I draw rough sketches of it? Do I create maps and a history and a development pattern for it?

I want to do all of these things. But that is part of the tragic nature of life - the undefinable, unknowable, and ultimately beautiful nature of each mind - of each person's observations and understanding of the world around them. Even if I share everything, down to the last imagined detail, I will never know how others experience this place. And I don't think I want to, either. The electric point where individuals communicate, understand, yet cannot inhabit each other - that is the beautiful, tragic moment.

my kansas city

i'm imagining a city that embraces the craggy bluffs and menacing rivers, as opposed to gradually sliding southwest into the dim ache of unchallenging and slightly bucolic meadows.

a dream without structure

• usul & the hamster


• smaller hamster


• mice colored like usul


• action sequence depicting escape


• avoiding knife slashes and swinging down to the ground from a cage


• running through a ruined warehouse building, similar to west bottoms


• dead ends


• realizing we are filming a movie


• somewhere in KCK


• hispanic neighborhood with giant old warehouses and packing plants


• not armoudale, somewhere west on the hill


• friends and i making movie


• we release multiple crazy young people from an asylum to help with the movie


• most are girls, a couple are guys


• one of the guys looks like jason schwartzmann, more severe and wearing a pristine white bathrobe, despite the fact he is in a damp, moody cell


• the girls were covered in mud and sang in haunting voices


• they assisted with the making of the film, but there was a strange gloom about


• cast members started turning up dead


• one of the ghost crazy people kissed me


• i felt infected


• in a shopping mall, top floor, by an escalator and atrium. large group of people watching someone in a shop shooting targets with a shotgun.


• one of the kids i'm with places a flashlight thingy on the glass and distracts the man shooting targets, making him miss and making him angry


• he comes out to beat us up, and catches hold of me and spins me around until i fly right out of the mall...


• movie is complete and i'm back in the warehouse area, trying to climb a rock wall and i end up in mexico, a very emerald green (scottish countryside) mexico...


• the crazy bathrobe guy shows up with a knife and chases me around until my new mexican friends save me.


• the police show up but i hide and pretend to be mexican and get to stay in this strange, industrial relic...

laconic, lonely faced sounds

you, quickly, haphazardly sharing your lack of balance, your crashing will silently shrill in the swelling day-old desire to mate. I eat mountains. I cannot see the top of the valley or the place where you begin. wandering sighs cannot amount to much so why am I so full? where did this sudden voice come from, this deep throated, rich laugh cutting across my grey skied, blue veined morning? these ships are sated, are casually staffed and silently run aground, engorged in the taking, yet mastless in a heavy wind - what could they take from me? I balance rocks on tideless dunes as filmy sea turtles slip into their swelling, crashing, ancient potential. you slowly, cautiously concentrating your senses, foaming your feet in the gloaming moments before you fall.

this expansive silence

i don't wait, that would be a lie.
i rarely sit still, however. my hands are busy with time, with action and blind-sided forward motion.
i scrape deep, not blindly but with an addled purpose.
a sort of half-aware illumination,
dimly present amongst the slag draining to daylight.
maybe i shouldn't say it like that.
maybe i should belt out some dead hymn to glory, or scratch a sad prosaic missive, or document the regularities of today like so many facts, unheeded.
but i don't wait. this quiet is not a stillness, and my direction is without form.
formless, I don't wait.

the expansiveness of now is overwhelming, therefore i dither in the details of the day, such as the caloric content of raisin bran or the likelihood of another frost.
you see, this sustains me.
and yet there is something in the fluid moment of spring, now sprung, when the gray air clears and green becomes a color once again.
when dirt loses its snowmelt and becomes a basepath again, a garden row, an empty lot.

i recommend the moving stillness, the expansive silence, the breathless maw.
here i have found it once again.

autodidact

i can't learn what i cannot teach.

but i can taste the sunshine of today, and it is brittle and new in this snow clouded landscape