Today I'm thinking about time. Twelve hours
every weekend, strapped into my car. 360-odd miles,
the ones I counted to the music breaking into my wandering mind,
and the ones that escaped me in a mad blur. I don't know what this means:
my drive, metaphorical and not, my pull to your push, the serenade
of touch and go, check your brakes, don't get too close and
why aren't you coming closer. 9:00 or after, picking up my feet
when all I wanted was to drag- the mess of your existence
scattered over every spare space. The dust was intoxicating
and I liked it best when you were awake, reposed
and smiling, your small hands outstretched to draw me in.
Sometimes you slept, your mismatched form twitching
and your mouth slack as I stood in the doorway, listening,
waiting, my inner battle of fear and hope pummeling against
my ribs. We were a tragedy, puppets strung out
in interrupted consciousness, jerking our own strings as the stream of life
passed neatly as though nothing outside existed.

can it make you feel love, love, love, love

Again, in my dreams. You're always there, on a semi-schedule of something like every other night. Sometimes you're laid up in my bed with the flu, and I'm bringing you water with a scoop of chocolate ice cream foaming at the top of the glass. Or you're sitting in my living room, two little sleeping bodies nestled into the furniture, and you're kissing their heads and looking at me. Or we're breaking into each other's personal space, the break-in, the rush, the almost-maybe-we-should. And we have, in my dreams, maybe twice. Mouths pressing into passion at the very least, and I can bring to memory at least one dream in which I fucked you- endlessly, wordlessly, wrapped and bathed in the curiousity that never fails to make me flush when you enter the room.

Last night, you were across the room, sitting on a chair on band concert risers. I was sitting in a folding chair on the floor of the room. Girlyman was there, or at least 2/3 of them: Nate and Ty. They were going to perform, but they had this weird extra band with them, and I wasn't happy about it. Then everyone else there said they wanted Nate and Ty to play Christian rock songs, and I started getting pissed, and I looked at my phone and you'd sent me a text message but I don't remember, now awake, what it said. But I got up and walked to you, behind you, and you turned ever so slightly to see me. I don't know what was said, but somehow, as dreamland tends to do, we were fast-forwarded without motion into my kitchen. We stood at the butcher block island, and the back door was open: the air was spring. You took my right hand and said, "I want to see the wonder," and I showed you what remains of the mystery stress-related mess on my fingers. The one purple dot still puffs on my pointer finger, and you ran your thumb over it in the most natural of ways, then flipped open your palm to show me a small purple circle scar. The same, somehow, but nothing of it. It was then that our foreheads bumped together, pausing within an inhale, the skin warm and smooth but the moment broken by my body stirring awake.

Almost maybe we should.

pinot grigio

here's the story
of rivers and tendrils of anticipation
the walk of purpose trapped beneath
everything i haven't been able to say.
i can do this now, under the wicked spell
of wine and collapsed thoughts.
there are tremors that shake me awake
in the deepest of nights, the darkest
of dreams and wandering chance.
you know probability like i understand nothing
more than syntax and what rests,
shivers, between the finest of lines. these shakes
and missteps filter through the awkward harmony
and i know everything hovering beneath the trespass,
i see the trials and the fears, the daydreams
mottled with sensibility and over-thinking.
i feel, and reel from, the incessant clunk
of arbitrary routine, responsibility, matter-of-fact
quantifiers but that's not quality: that's misstep.
what i know is rhythm and drive, possibility
interlaced with theory and you can fill in the blank
because i've already said too much.

dissemination

charcoaled fine lines dissolve into the background;
dusk's drop cloth of an orange-rimmed sunset
glistens the tightrope that swings between headway
and steady every day nothing.
gently with the rolls of thunder fracturing in the distance
escaping light breaks over interrupted movements-
the armored trepidation of reality- a tender and tenacious crawl
between yes, no, what you think you know, and what you think
you've been able to say without exactly saying.
this double-edged weapon of verbal explosion
illuminates an obliquely wandering path
far past the horizon, beyond promise and doubt, and it blinks
like headlights or maybe it's blinking like one a.m. in union square-
which, while we're there:

i wish i was still in new york city
where these stomping ruminations get caught, dragged beneath
the break-speed whirl of taxis, the tumultuous ease
of rush hour footsteps. and the lurch of the train
disseminates patterned thoughts, driving conscience
from the unspoken script that multiplied and murmured
endlessly. but here, outside the city limits,

this weighted dance swings heavy and low. wrenched
from the ashen strokes of able distraction, these delicate lines
alight and break from their suffocation, heaving themselves
into the careening traffic of my mind. red lights failed me long ago.
and it rushes me back
to the place where notions
can't break into words thrust from my mouth
and i trip over instead of saunter between the lines,
it's just that, to say, to explain:
when i don't answer i'm always
trying to say yes.

making you out of everything

I think I'm ready to write our story now-- the story that exists between the thick lines of my mind, the one that rattles me awake in the sleep of night and the break of day. Write it as we are and everything we could be.

I saw you today, first time in too long I think, and those eyes, that little smile, your hands your everything. I lose it every time. And I mumbled because I was afraid to open my mouth too wide, and then you just stood there and talked to me and we rapid fired yes no back and forth like it was water slipping through river rocks and if we'd been alone, I can't promise you that I wouldn't have touched you. (But actually, I could promise that I wouldn't have touched you because I still haven't seen the blink of the green light, and without that- I sit still.) What always, always gets me with you is the way you won't look away when you're talking to me. Eye to eye, word to word, hidden meaning to supressed wonder.

One solitary finger to finger brush in the passing of a tiny tome of sound. Accidental and beautiful. Miniscule, too. But your smile, your eyes, your fucking everything. I flush into dust the moment you appear. I'm not yet sure if this is good or bad. I'm not yet sure if you've started to realize anything.

Yes, this is floating in my head, chord and rhyme tangled in what ifs. Yes, I am making you a response.

If you were for me, I would never let you go.

what will you wake up and see

Booked my flight this morning. Still have to figure out where I'm staying, but I have an option to fall back on if nothing else pans out, so I'm not worried. And I have to rent a car, but again, not worried about that. The flight was the agent of nerves. I suck at planning, and in the middle of my tab-flipping this morning, I lost the perfect flight for the perfect price. But all's not lost because I ended up with a very similar flight for about $20 more. Whatev! It's done, and I'm getting a mini-vacation out of it since I've decided to fly down Thursday night and come back Monday evening. & the conference itself is Friday night-Sunday afternoon. So I'M EXCITED!

In this morning's madness of planning, I realized that I've managed to lose one of my credit cards, and I cannot figure out how this happened. It has a balance of zero, so clearly it's somewhere in the house, but it's not anywhere where it should be. Got a new account # already, whatever, I'm over it.

But as I was searching for the card, I found a fortune cookie fortune that makes the most fucking sense ever: "No one is standing in your way anymore, it is time to move forward."

HOW FUCKING PROPHETIC IS THAT. Other than how the , should be a ; -- I can look past that and realize that I needed to find this today. After I almost let my ex piss all over my happy fucking parade on Friday, I needed to read that fortune. She's not standing in my way anymore. She was, and I let her, but now... no one is there. The only person that could be in my way is myself, and I'm not willing to do that to myself any longer...

...hence the proactive nature of forward-thinking and planning for this relatively major event. I've obviously never done anything like this before, and it seems that everyone I talk to about it thinks it's a much bigger deal than I do, which is funny because I tend to exaggerate things, but it makes sense-- because if I allowed myself to realize how kind of huge this is, I'd be completely freaked out and I'd stand in my own way. See how I did that? That's what we call PROGRESS.

And anyway. The whole thing makes me feel really fucking smart and, oh I don't know, progressive? Necessary? Validated. I'm still amazed.

all you really want is to be here with me

Love is foreign anymore. It used to come in sweeps complete with rushes of infallability and tiny rips of inadequacy but now, now it's wandering elsewhere. I don't want it to come home anytime soon, and if it does, I plan on being away and/or deaf to the persistent knocks against every tendon in my heart-swollen body.

I wish I could say with finality: I DON'T LOVE YOU ANYMORE. But I'm afraid of lying because I hear it's a disease; I lied a lot when I was a kid, too young to understand the tangles of my own tongue. My mind lies to me, sometimes, but I can't envision reality because I swear it evades me. Kind of like lost stars on a blinking night sky: they move without wind or reason, and I can't touch them no matter how high I reach. My arms have never been long enough, my chest has never been big enough for my whims of infatuation.

Mostly I remember your skin overlapping my own, your mouth crushing mine, words firing between grasps and whispers of nightmares. You were most loving when you were half asleep. You couldn't think, then, with your brain stuffed with sleep. Words came easily, promises flowed without second thought. I love you, I want you, there is no one but you, I've never loved like this.

On the kitchen floor, with the serrations and seeds surrounding us, we aimed for the perfect photogenic kiss. We always disagreed on the best shot. All I ever wanted to do was broadcast our love.

And now, my dreams have bloomed into making out with Melissa Ferrick, which is completely weird but admittedly not a bad dream to have (two nights in a row, nonetheless). You don't need to trail me in my night visions. You are always there in the daylight, shimmers spread over my radar though I've tried again and again to turn off my signal, to shut down, unplug, abscond.

I've never been good at letting go. Never. When I fall, I fall without limits and boundaries. I don't know how to make myself stop. Maybe, I think, this could be a good thing, someday, when I'm ready and when my heart won't need to seal itself up months, years later to edge into the healing (again). And I know what the fear is. I don't know how to believe that there is someone(s) who will not force me to lock my heart and swallow the key. I don't know how to think that love may not always end up hurting me, and that someone(s) might be worthy of letting in.

So I stumble about with my hands taped to my shoulders, arms crossed, heart blocked. I can't breathe in this collapsing makeshift shelter; I wish I'd learned along the way how to run, how to fly.

inside

i could spin you indecent rhymes, the kind riddled
with haunts and maybes, the kind you don't leave behind
but take with you, carry like a second beat in your heart. i want to know
if i dissolve you. unscripted, uncoded-- tell where it is
that i moved effortlessly into you because every time i shut my eyes
all i see is the glistening movement of realizing
i don't know how to walk away.

all I remember / are these opaque conversations

So much going on in my head. So much that I can't seem to get a good grasp on much of anything. Is this what happens when you, three months later, still love your ex and have twisted dellusions of getting back together in living ever after in Happy Magic Land (& totally doubt the existence of said H.M.L.)? When you're still caught in this fierce whirlwind attraction to someone who is nearly impossible to read; someone you've never had more than the briefest of miscalculated/incidental touches and there was that one time it was just a touch more and I swear my heart hit the ceiling; someone who, in all likelihood, is not of your sexual persuasion? And when you're, again, talking/dabbling with an ex from years ago- the one that made your soul bleed, the one that ruined your trust in women, the one that you always wanted because you knew you couldn't have her?

This is also what happens when you go see Chris Pureka in concert for the third time and subsequently cannot stop listening to her music. I love her, it's true, but when I'm in this frame of mind, 90% of her songs make me choke on my own exhales.

Mostly, I can't stop listening to "Silo Song."

Mostly, I'd simply like to grab hold of my life and gain A) perspective, B) clarity, and C) hope. Oh, and I'd really like to hear from the Conference people. I'm not asking for much, life.