plans

Sometimes you're in the shower and realize the longest parts of your hair are over halfway down your back.

Your life plans start shifting to include some kind of epic rat-tail the next time you go crazy and cut it all off.

You are then forced by the weight of this decision to realize that this is perhaps your most solid future life plan.

Why does everyone keep asking.

omnes

tonight i saw the first real smile in a mirror i've seen in a long time

i was thinking about latin class

wdnsdy

Scrubbing the gross linoleum in my kitchen, perched on the balls of my feet in a childlike squat with a lint-riddled sponge in my hand, scrubbing scrubbing like I've got something to atone for. The oven is preheating for dinner; I haven't eaten yet today and each time I stand up to rinse the sponge in the sink I glide on a sickening wave of a head-rush, the heat and fumes and hunger coating my vision with resin and making my mind go blissfully, soaringly empty.

Then, back to the task, mopping the floor by hand like a downtrodden woman in a silent film, I imagine my face reduced to just eyes and nostrils and lips on a shapely white mask. I am thinking about my day.

The waking to thunder; the steady ongoing rain. Spent an undeservedly-paid few hours reading about the Powhatan women, and I remember them now, laboring intently along the banks of the Chickahominy river, handsome and strong, arthritic by thirty. They worked together in small groups out of necessity, digging for marsh roots, weeding the corn. A pair of women wererequired to make a hut, each scaling a sapling-pole until the tips meet and can be bound together. At night, after a day of working to ensure continued survival, everyone danced, then they fucked.

My scrubbing wrist is starting to feel odd: weakness/numbness/tingling that worries me after reading it in so many medical assessments of disabled individuals. Today I walked through rain with a red umbrella, past bodily-compromised humans I'm happy not to be, frog-like ones in electronic wheelchairs; a stroke woman with one dead stiff leg and an arm curled up against her side. "Never leave me," I say to the rhythm of my feet as my legs carry me swiftly across concrete rivers of purring cars.

In class, familiarity. A friend, rare and dear, was unexpectedly there in the now-too-cold air of the theatre. Kan was all dripping dark curls and dripping crimson knees following a rain-related bicycling incident. He smelled sweet and wet and fresh, like the raw rising dough of cinnamon buns and crisp apples. I'm pretty sure he doesn't read this. If so, sorry kan, I smelled you.

There's no poignant end-point to all this. I'm tired of writing, and my wrist is still weird, and it's time to eat.

lizards

Dream:

A woman with short-cropped blonde hair toured me through the upper level of an abandoned brick building, which had been transformed into a large apartment of sorts, with one expansive room that sunk a level into the floor with stairs leading down.
"We had to re-create the frogs' natural environment in order for them to survive," she was saying, leading me down into the lowered area. "We imported their native soil and water. The fungus should not reach them here." As she spoke, the room began filling with water. It swelled my chin and crept up over my mouth and nostrils. "The frogs are quite picky," she said, disappearing inconspicuously. A loose cloud of small fish approached; retreated among the ribbons of light. The underwater room lost its borders; my feet sank gently into the sand floor. I had not yet seen the frogs, though I understood them to be elusive. I did see a large black fish with fins so feathery it looked like a billowing garbage bag, moving with purpose.

I climbed the staircase out of the underwater room and was confronted by a six-foot-long monitor lizard, leathery pouch of a throat swelling and constricting. He bounded up to me and I thought plainly that I finally understood people who fear large, excited dogs. My body kept cringing away, which interested the lizard more, his head tilted and curious. "That's Jeremy, he won't hurt you," said the blonde's voice. Jeremy's tongue extended two feet in front of him, a rope of bubble-gum tipped in black, and sucked back into the small, handsome arch at the center of his snout. I still did not quite trust Jeremy.

again everything just bewilders me, etc., repeat

Why didn't humans, like the frogs and salamanders, develop more ways to cope?

The same essential species, but each adjusted to excel in a specific way which enables life processes. A clutch of transparent spawn clinging to the underside of a leaf. Pouches on either flank, pulsating with tadpoles. A frothy lair under the desert sand, sitting in wait for months or years. Poison ribs that push through the skin, heal, push through again, heal. Communication reduced and simplified to the loudest chirrup or the most elegant arm-wave.

My cats wake me up early.

One of them might die; they will both die someday. I will die someday. If he dies, I say, I can help more cats that need love. I have so much. I need to stop letting this consume me. "If I had all the money," I think, with clownishness that I feebly use to try and cover up for a notion so ripe and wrinkled that it makes me hate myself to know I think it so automatically -- if I had all the money! I could fix things. I could fix so many things. I fix things now. There will never not be things to fix.

Tools, tadpoles. Instead of evolving pertinent physical ways to cope with survival all I've got is this brain and these thumbs and these tools this human unrest; this eternal whisper of "fix, fix, fix."

People I haven't seen in awhile ask me how I'm doing; it's different than being asked the same question by someone you talk to frequently. You're forced to assess in broader terms. Invariably, I answer truthfully, "I'm great, I'm really great." Considering my placement in a vast, nebulous timeline is a comfort.

I can take a bath. I can take a blade and make my shins smoother than taut doeskin.

I can spend time with friends whose voices hit my ears like those of family members, such familiar tones, I can conjure up in abstractness with no words attached. Disembodied flute, pitch, and lilt; the memory of sound pairing this information certainly somewhere where it stores music, a web of vaguely defined memory and association. File under "brother/sister." React accordingly.

My friend leaves an imprint of his mammal warmth on the couch; I sit down on it and it's such a shock, this residual energy. I realize it's the closest I've felt to really touching another person in a long time and something cracks, like an eggshell, in the hollow where throat meets trunk and trickles strange pain down my ribs. I don't know if this is being lonely; I don't know if I'm allowed to be lonely.

thurs

This morning my bedroom is cool and blue. There is something like the taste of raw broccoli in my throat, fresh and bitter and fibrous. The cat woke me up with her needle-fingers on my scalp too early, when whiskey still had me tied up in a dream (A man who had been in love with and dismissed by me decided to court my mother, with great success. I found this to be entirely inappropriate and enraging).

I should like to have some coffee.

to-dos

· Clean bicycle. I feel like the guy who buys a motorcycle because he's always thought they were awesome, but doesn't know how/is a little scared to ride it. So he just keeps tending to it, and talking about it.
· Ride bicycle somewhere.
· Perhaps go to garden; people want eggs. I am the bringer of eggs. I'm frankly scared of the glut of tomatoes and peppers; cannot cope with the waste.
· Watch a dang netflix so I can send them back and get more nature documentaries nature nature nature always always teach me sir david.
· Write a dang letter to Mandible; I compose them in my head so much, believe me. Today is the day I drag Alma out and commit!
· Pay dem billz.
· Stop writing lists of things to do later while at work, "working."

but who

I just typed an entire entry and deleted it out of mental embarrassment for my own triteness.

It's this headache, is all.

Why this, then -- I am telling you not out of some adolescent desire for attention (though that is ever-present, of course), but maybe to illustrate the withholding, the "not enough" which is just, just silly and stupid but, you know. I'm sorry, I'm not sure why I'm here. Everything is not quite right.

Soon I will have a drink of water and my body will go on living. But who will touch it.

a kind of aggressive coral red pink that contrasts teal blue

I've never worn lipstick, nor much make-up at all really beyond colorful eye paints, meant to decorate but not conceal. I took a tube of lipstick from my mother, who no longer wears it. The color is called "Eager". I'm not sure what this means, but I like what it's doing to my mouth; my wryness levels.

hhhhhhhhhhhhh

it overwhelms, often; i'll raise my head and it's been a week of soundless, breathless time, hurrying past like water,

this river feels like chaos, bashing my awkward frame until i become not an animal but a spine that hurts, shoulders are not wings, hips are not magic, when i dream i touch your arms with such lightness and intensity, wanting to feel without the clammy grip, seeking out the delicate hollows where skin lies over tendon and vein.

this is confusing. you cannot know. i want to bite you, you thing in the river i cling to, let me tell you a story:

once there was a girl who was

good enough, and strong enough

work feels strange today

every new piece of information doesn't settle neatly but spirals into fractals of increasing complication
a day when your pulse give your whole body a rocking sway when you sit still and there's no breath to catch, like your lungs are two sacs heavy with sand and mucus, shoulders so taut and clenched that with every cartilage-scraping motion they feel closer and closer to crushing themselves pulverizing and hollowing bone and re-forming sprouting into giant pseudo-reptilian wings muscles coil and twitch and spring through the glass of the window and into the sky on the wind free and screaming and screaming and free in the sky on the wind screaming and screaming and screaming

august, saturday

this heat

i can see my cats' bodies

pulse and twitch with their hearts

or breathing

then realize i'm doing likewise

a throbbing creature

face shining with minerals

Artemis/Diana carved in marble

flesh soft and sticky and salt and magic

my family and i sit

fighting these ways in which

our planet attempts to kill us

I have too many chiles. Peppers (serrano, cayenne, jalapeno, etc.). So many I don't even, I don't even know. The two ways in which I can store them are "dry" and "cold," neither of which I am, so the project waits.

I was trying to write about how I'm hot, and I complain about being hot, but it really doesn't bother me anymore. I am highly and reluctantly adjustable, to anything.

This flexibility frightens me a little. Whom will I be tomorrow; in a year.

friday friday friday

existing in a state of semisolid
semi i don't know
vapor, in the air

There's a growing rift between consciousness and body.
Mostly contempt for it, what it wants and thinks it needs. The aches and nerve-ends tingling, like coral polyps, seeking attention.
I do a pretty good job of punishing her thoughhhhhh~

life in the undergrowth

I dreamed about cockroaches; well, first I dreamed I had to go back and live in my old apartment again, one of the few recurring nightmares I have. Everything was very clean, and my cats would not communicate with me with their eyes or bodies. And there were cockroaches everywhere, small wispy-antennae'd cockroaches dragging the corpses of other bugs into their holes.

RE: Storm. I could see the lightning in my sleep and anticipate the loudest thunder. Thusly I rode it as an orchestral score.

My walk to and from class there were bugs everywhere, it seemed, shiny oblong black beetles careening toward my feet, my feet that always feel slightly pigeon-toed for some reason lately since my foot-stab injury or maybe it's just from wearing the same pair of sambas for about three years now. I got the old pair of sambas out of my closet from before this pair, and they are now in better shape than the current ones, but they don't feel right. I need new shoes, but I'd rather be able to afford alcohol. This is a lie, I can probably afford shoes right now, except I live in constant fear of veterinary bills. There was a dead beetle on the floor when I got home.

I feel as though I am constantly about to trip over myself. I feel folded into myself everywhere, wincing at the sharp beams of eyes I can see inspecting me from behind my sunglasses where they can't tell I'm looking back. The laser antennae gaze, assessing me in an animal way, friend-foe-food.

By some coincidence, we watched "Them!" in class today.


This all feels stupid, I wish I could stop feeling so stupid. I am nibbling a crisp-rice-marshmallow treat my coworker bought me in a motherly way. The sugar fuels my small activities. If I keep the tasks simple and linear, my brain won't overload with the longing for the elsewise and the moreso. The last time it stormed I slept on the floor with my head on the couch where it still smelled so so good, making me throb about the throat and chest. Soon I will communicate only in pheromones; smell for them. Perhaps soon I will also find some way to release this inner pressure valve and become efficient with everything.

last night i slept for four hours, and woke up every hour, and every hour when i went back to sleep i dreamed my whole life. every two hours, there was a small cat mewling in my window, and on the alternating hours my whole body shook with the noises of lawn mowers and hellish, caterwauling garbage trucks.