Sometimes I just sit there and imagine out all my possible lives; is it odd to feel immensely grateful for things that may never be?

find me in the borderlands
the twilight gardens
where mortal life strafes divinity and nothingness

find me
and with me watch the coming dark
so that it take us together all at once

i can't face the night alone.

at night I am taken by despair
throughout my life it's been like this
is it the women I adore, idolize, objects of impossible love?
is it humanity slowly killing the planet they depend on for everything?
is it Godlessness and the specter of mortality, the transience of all things?


there was a time when I was clinically depressed, and I learned to regularize my eating, sleeping, and exercise habits to flatten out the daily spikes of emotional bankruptcy.

maybe it's not such a bad idea to do that again.

or maybe it's what I come back to here in America. Things are just too easy here, so purposeless and questionable. I am at my best when in my imagined land of the suffering and the victimized, because there can I call upon myself to be brave, to be strong, to believe in things out of necessity, and to see the path to others, that we find solace in company and mutual support. In a land of plenty, what need have we for any but ourself?

"Sometimes I feel like there are a million people out there, and somehow their lives hinge on mine, like every decision I make, big or small, every thing I do or don't do, affects them. And when I start thinking like that, I take a very long time to make a decision, because it's a lot more important than I am on my own." --Alyra

The motion of reaching across to draw the comforter over you in bed and ward against the chill is universal

Do you ever wonder that, laying in high summer pasturelands, it was once a woolen cloak that wrapped you

Or a drift of leaves on an earthen bed in the shade of a prehistoric glen

Or a cut of woolly mammoth's hide on the forest floor of an ice covered age

Surely they dreamt of warmer places, the imaginative seed for a future of synthetic cotton comforters and spring-loaded mattresses, but only could the most prescient of our ancestors have foreseen that in abandoning the hardships of survival we would forsake a visceral link with nature and our natural selves, all but disappeared save for the stray transpositions of musing poets.

EDIT: rewrite to: The motion of reaching across to draw the comforter over yourself in bed is universal. 10/14/09

Post-It note to a story of unrequited love

"You're so beautiful, I would write for you pages and pages of the most awful heart-wrenching angsty poetry ever to stain the page. My gratitude to unrequited love, for it means you shall never have to read the cloying lovesick lines I pen for you."

the violent hum of the common house fly

the ebullient quarrels of sparrows

in the freshness of morning, space itself is held together by shivering spider web strands, newly laid across the paths we tread, the seats we sit, they flicker-glimmer in the air, and as we pass they cling to us briefly tenacious then float mournfully to the floor, mirages laid low of the connectedness of all things.

teaching patience to children is often best done by adults who have none

this is not teaching by example.

in the world of half-dreams and waking dreams, I sleep beside a ghost

I draw myself near to her, she warm against me, her face against mine, she fits me and I am unwhole without her

and then the fabric of the world shifts imperceptibly, and I am on my back staring at the ceiling

my hand passes through the haunted air beside me, and my tired eyes seek without success the way back

i think 30 percent of my unhappiness is caused by dreams of happiness

tortuously distant, wavering elusive


50 percent of my unhappiness is caused by other people's unhappiness and the mountain of stupidities that are usually behind it, and by this I mean all people, friends and strangers, people in the present, and those in the future that pay the prices of our mistakes or, in a more ideal world, reap the benefits of our labors and decisions.


the remaining 20 percent is probably my unhappiness with myself, disappointing weaknesses, moments of cowardice or mediocrity, veins of apathy and slothfulness i had thought myself purged of long ago woven about the core of my being, mingling perversely, indistinguishably with aspects of a more sterling character

life in the particular is fragile, vital organs sewn of tissue that can be undone, skin and skull that can be pierced, cut and crushed and cracked, an unlucky fall, the combination of force and a pointy object; then the drumming of blood and the rise and fall of the chest cavity whose continued motion, even at rest, is indispensable to life's continuation in this one little frail particular.

life in the general is near unstoppable

notes from a dawn walk

in the pure oblique light of first morning a pill bug's shadow floats: the long filament sketchings of
its legs, working in eerie unison, scarcely touch the ground.

a herd of snails mass migrate across the sidewalk--their bodies glow translucent.