As usual, I find myself moved by history: this flowing river of events that is controlled by no mortal.  Never underestimate the power of Heaven to move the hearts of men.  I guess I was designated a translator on the bus, even though the person I was translating for can't even really understand the language with which I spoke to her.  It doesn't matter.  I couldn't understand myself.  I was crying.  Decades of isolation for West Berlin, walled into communism, Stalin marching soldiers in to pay tribute at a communist monument--one that still stands today.  And then, one night, it's just all over.   A false statement based on a false wish, but the people wanted it and the soldiers gave it and everyone just hacked the thing to bits.  It was months before I was born.  How I wish I were there.  They would have to tear me away.

These mirrors creep me out man.  I dream vividly of sleepiness and being late: I don't need to see myself in the morning.  Or at night, either.  When I wake up and punch the walls, mascara lining my eyes in ways that are not at all flattering.  You refuse to laugh at me, for fear of nonsense flying from my lips and fists. 

And there is a virus here, even if it only comes out in dreams.  I feel heighted: reflected a million times and counting.  Hemingway rooms and floors and the black-backed glass in front of my bed is too dark.  I don't look good in mascara when it's been on my face for too few hours of sleep that equates only to a gash across my consciousness. 

We will deal with it when morning sunlight streams through the wall of this pyramid, so iconic with death.  So trendy to put living people in.  Austrian Trend, it's called.  And didn't I dream of Bast in that night of screaming incongruities?  It was a dream of waking and lying there without rest. 

I kept on shaking in the night: a burst of life.  Anyway, I'm alive in the morning. 

Break was a vacuum and a carcrash--the most smashingest of summers, except it was three days of February: I don't know if you were expecting flight: an hour in the taxi line, call it a night.

We say we want movement and airborne poetry, well it comes to me on the wind, it'll come to you singing.  A slight floating, kite-like grace in the gale, folding itself soft as its wings fail.  Thud in the grass, a cool lawn in a night of broken glass, twinking, hung wet in the velvet sky, which folds in a crush and a nebulous sigh.

Really it's air in which we're all swimming, a return to weightlessness is what water brings.  Our natural state: we were born in oceans, and to them we return.
There is no use hiding in folds of dirt, it will all be rushed away, a crush of wave and the Earth will find itself clean.

Spinning in a vacuum and a car crash, reeling senseless with the whiplash.  Covered in lichen and moss, raked and plowed and dug and boiled--eruptions of inflammations gone untended.  Only when the Earth is uncared for will it be free-- the frigid silence that follows existence.

A star shatters in the distance, and life may find itself on other worlds at the very last, to relieve the planet upon which the universe took flight.  The emptiness is singing poetry is singing life.

So this is an update for someone special, even though if he reads this he'll never comment upon anything it contains.  But we're tight, anyway.  We were raised by peas together, and peas are known for their thoroughness.

You'll have to excuse me because I fell in love with today.  With the sadness and salty streets.  Felt like licking the sidewalks because they crunched under my shoes.  Converse, low-tops in fact, which were mistaken for the higher ones during anatomy.  And the people studying anatomy...you'd think they'd know these things.  But the way the teacher proctored her midterm, running in and out of the room, forgetting directions, forgetting whole sections, you'd know why she loves to get her nails done that special shade of mauve.  Last week they were pink though; I feel pink.  Pink and green and yelllow.  They're light colors to be sure, but so desolate and sad at the same time.  Like something you'd dream up on a salty sidewalk, making your way home alone.  It's okay: home is virtually in the train station parking lot.  I love the station, it's eroded away, all corrosion arising from rattling tracks and the caustic spirit of New Jersey.  We love the idea of leaving for another place.

In my journal it says I live in California.  It also said I'd rather live elsewhere.  It lies.  Still, but under the guidance of the Gods of the Red Lights, blinking away benignly in the meadows.  I remember the last time we left Matt's car there, paying homage to them, alone and quietly.  It felt desolate.  But maybe if we hadn't been so preoccupied with each others' tongues and lips and thoughts and fluids the heat wouldn't have been on.  Both of us claimed responsibility, but we walked back under lime green streetlamps, even more desolate than the yellow ones.  Maybe somewhere they come in pink, I'd really like to know.  You'd tell me I'd like to know anything, anyway, seeeing as we're so preoccupied with thoughts and fluids.

           I grew up in a city torn apart.  In childhood, I had played in the charred shadows of buildings, reduced to husks along the numbered streets.  At night or in rainy weather, the caution lights seemed to guide me home, blinking in a hazy inexhaustion.   I used to question my mother repeatedly about their source of power, believing magic in my pre-school days and then turning to my devout belief in science after the schools were, after many delays, rebuilt.

 

          Schools, those had been the first things they had erected, and mine had been the first generation to re-inhabit the boxy things.  The Reconstruction Bill had been passed in the week of my older sister's birth, but no attempt had even been made at shifting the rubble until a year after mine.  I remember looking out of our single, grimy window and seeing giant cranes angling gracefully into the distance; dropping chunks of concrete in heavy thuds.  The noises reminded older inhabitants of the city's destruction. 

 

          "How odd," my grandmother would say before her death, "That war sounds so much like peace."  She often whispered this to me in the days before the schools were (re)erected.  We were the only two souls in a small apartment: both my parents would be working, and my sister had been old enough to gain independence.  She worked at a library in a richer district of the city, I believe it began to pain her to come home to see her family in such a condition.

 

           "Lotus, Lotus," my mother and grandmother would chorus whenever she stepped into the room, filling it with her trembling smile.  She would spend time with the adults first, listening to the radio with our parents while I curled up in a corner of the room with grandmother, either trying to comprehend one of my father's vastly incomprehensible college textbooks (the only educational material we had in the house) or flipping through one of the faded picture books the library had thrown out, and my sister had bootlegged home.

 

         After she had fulfilled her obligations to adulthood, she would take me into the streets.  "Lotus and Ruby time, Lotus and Ruby time," I had chanted delightedly.  My parents tell me that it became such a blur coming off of my youthful tongue it melted into one word, "Lotusandruby, Lotusandruby."  Just imagine, a post-war husband and wife naming their only children after gems and flowers.  I can't call myself a gem, but Lotus certainly lived up to her name.

 

        She swept through our lives like a petal brush, leaving us wide-eyed in her wake.  In retrospect, I believe she knew this effect she had on us, and tried valiantly to keep up the mystique.  For our sake much more than hers, her learned eyes looked at us and saw our pitiful state of existence: my grandmother snatching at sunlight, my father snatching at darkness.  How deep was our need, how fervent our faith!  She provided a mysterious link away from toil and the anonymity of subsistence living, and into a world of books, of books!  Pages and pages of ideas spilled across paper, precious and yellowed. 

 

           And not just books, she provided a verbal release as well.  She filled the air with chatter on the occasions she took my hand and walked with me through the safer streets, just before sunset.  Her animated voice pointed out such things as the red-gold of the dying light, and how it fell against the arches of fallen bridges.  It would remind her of the art she'd seen in books, and she'd find herself trying to describe one of Whistler's paintings, or the golden locks one of Marisot's girls, and how it reminded her of the color of my hair (the hair we shared, actually) when she'd seen it.  The most mysterious things she told me about though, were crayons, and how they wrote in color instead of blackness.  

 

         These enigmas fascinated me at first, but then began to fade from my mind.  I was a child of metal cranes, and could not believe in her vivid paradise. 

 

 

It was the greatest failing of my childhood. 

If I were a superhero, I would be Obscurity Girl.  She isn't much of an alter-ego, but I'm sure she'd say the same of me.

***

There are no sidewalks here, we walk in the middle of the roads.

***

And if we could find ourselves, we could find anything.

***

Wouldn't you say that realism outside of hero-ism is merely wishful thinking?

 

            Someone once told me that the purpose of life was to find ourselves, lost as we were amongst the brooding torrents that make up human existence.  I can no longer remember if this person was real or merely a dream, the lines of reality have never been defined for me as they have been for others.  I don�ft know if this is because I have chosen to make my own reality, or because no one has made one for me.  If truly the latter, then society has failed.

Is that a good way to start a book?

   And why am I not allowed to scream?  You run back into my life everytime I hope I've shut you out.  A gnat, forever buzzing around my neck, attracted to the cheap perfume mother bought me.  Years ago, old scents from old memories. Attracted to them still? I've tried so hard to send you away, and there you go, winging back to me like a bat out of hell.  Simple fangs no longer scare me.   
   Prick tears into my eyes again, please, torture me with your arguments and belligerence thrown at my self-righteous distancing.  My barricades can hold against you now, this willful suspension of disbelief against you and your highnosed arrogance.  And if I fake my detachment it's no more than you fake your "coolness" the mish-mash of slang acquired from hours and hours of television.  The dead poet, materialistic philosophy of paint ball guns and playing bad rap over crappy connections. 
   I've asked you to stop, made attempts to get out of this whole mess- but that summer (the one that's infected the summers that have followed) full of heat and turpentine and with me so far away wasn't it?  I have little problem with it now- go chase after your chap lipped whores and insightful crude jokes; just leave me out of it now, thank you.
   But you couldn't, could you?  You've got a barb stuck into my flesh, digging under my skin.  Thanks for the thought, but I'm not in love with you- never was.  Teenage infatuation, go figure.  Come on and kick me, bitch.

Poems folded into pockets

Won¡¯t you lead the way?

Past citadels and Viking prows,

Castles stonefaced- gray facades.

We¡¯ll race upon midnight dew,

Shine purple skies with

Lightning¡¯s fast rays

Fill our sight with gray landscape,

Kiss stars and revel in shadow

Then follow dawn¡¯s gaze,

To far expanses of fair Arcady,

Land of love and melody!