it’s always a bit intriguing to me…sad but not in a way where i pity. it’s a desperate understanding i have for these people. it’s a horrible ache to uncurl the fingers, even if i’ve never touched them, watch them, drop them, on their way to the sun. those people you meet who burn with such a windwhipped flame, blown skyward by indignation or a festering fury or an inseparable sadness that they shoot inexorably on an arc aimed perfectly toward their own destruction. their lives are upended, spiraling, fractured, always darkening and utterly gothic tales of wreck and ruin. the friction and conflict they meet on their jagged way seems to soothe their overheated souls and they only respond to each incident with a deeper lean forward.

somewhere early they were stamped or carved or branded by the hand of fate. it was not light upon them in leaving directions home.

anyway yeah i think after july 6, i may actually be able to at least get my loudest tooth taken care of (can’t afford the crown that will be needed tho) so i can begin sleeping and laying off the ibuprofen. i’m really sticking it to my liver lately trying to drown out the pain from this tooth. between whiskey and ibuprofen, i’m kickin that thing around like a heavy bag. but what are you gonna do? trust me, liver health at this point is pretty abstract. pain that makes your actual hair hurt and gets you from sleep to pacing in five seconds? that’s something you deal with, whatever’s on hand will do!

but july 6 is when a check clears. and its at least big enough to light up the dentist’s eyes i hope. enough to get me in there and have the decay drilled out of this tooth. even just doing THAT would probably give me a lot of relief. altho honestly, i think its so close to the nerve at this point that if they go in, they’re gonna take the whole nerve out and good, is say! begone! your nest has been disturbed, your peace shattered. there is no more protection for you and so i wish you well, nerve. sorry i couldn’t take care of you better.

one day i’ll write the story of what happened to my teeth this time around, what happened with my stomach, how that whole volcanic thing began. it began when i was working at a place…well, i haven’t told many stories about that place. but when i do, trust me. you’ll understand why my stomach started erupting acid. although i almost think telling is the worst way to talk about that experience. painting would be much better. but you’d need sound, too definitely.

yeah, i definitely see an entire series in my future on that job. that “friend.” i shouldnt put it in quotes. i befriended him, so be it. i should not try now to devalue it. but how much can you befriend a boss? and a boss like him? but…i saw the good part of him…so yes. i was his friend. yeah. that doesnt mean i won’t tell the story exactly as i lived it, tho.

anyway, that started it, and shortly after, just trying to “make it’ in the city deepened it. and here i am trying to remember what’s important. peace of mind. an open heart an open mind. but you can’t just let anything in. you can’t just let anything into your heart and your mind. or you can, but there will be consequence. your body may not like it. the body is the agent with two feet on this plane, the body talks to the world about what the mind and heart are doing. especially if the mind won’t listen to the heart. then the body talks louder.

i was trying to write about how everything is connected in my first essay to the think tank institute that just made me a Fellow. i figured i’d use the place to get abstract, to try and flesh out important larger patterns i see; to try and offer paths toward new, effective, expansive progressive thought. the first edit back suggests they want less of a “meditation” and more of a coherent and strident argument for ‘progressive values.’ maybe they called it a “meditation” cuz its mostly questions. i thought they were good ones. i think a good question is worth ten good answers. i’ll see what i can get going on the next edit, which i have to give them today.

my favorite part of ben by michael jackson is how he sings notes from the relative minor but over the (major) tonic. that creation of a tension, and an incidental third addition, tells the part of the song that words never will.

go ahead and ring it for only ten or fifteen seconds and in no time at all you will feel as if your left eye is trying to sag out of your face, and your jaw weighs four hundred pounds. (pain itself is extremely heavy, that is why it turns your hair white and makes your mind empty.) now, that’s an alarm you won’t sleep through!

one swig of something like the popular drink known as “coffee” and in three seconds your alarm will be first moaning, and then outright screaming! the reaction is almost instanteous, it’s a very impressive device with extremely organic and complex circuitry.

TO RESET

to reset alarm, simply brush open area of tooth (you will need to break a tooth in half to construct the alarm) with cold water for a moment. however, unless you brush out the entire mouth (tongue too!) your saliva will contain minute sugar traces and they will set the alarm off again. this is a scenario in which you can experience the “fade in” behavior of the alarm. simply brush out entire mouth out to prevent this “Fading in” of the “alarm” sensation.

SENSITIVITY:

should you desire to do anything ridiculous or “extreme” like drink an entire cup of coffee rather than the far more reasonable sip, it is advised you stand in the bathroom, brush in hand. you will need to brush after every swallow. yes, the alarm is sensitive. the degree of sensitivity cannot be adjusted after the construction of your device, so remember to break the initial tooth carefully! for example, should the break run below the gum line, then the saliva will actually pool and rest inside the open area of the device, which will render your alarm with more or less of a hair trigger setting.

note: if the user attempts to drink more than a few swallows of “coffee” or any other sugary drink, the alarm will soon be ringing so intensely that the user will begin to lose the ability to think coherently at which point it may scare them to look up and see a disheveled, mopheaded person in the mirror with a cup of coffee and a toothbrush looking slightly annoyed, or grimacing, depending on what stage of this experiment is unfolding.

USES:

this device has many uses, mainly so that one may know at any point in the day when any particular foodstuff has sugar in it. the ability to detect is unerring, incapable of failing and immediate.

warning: it is not advised to eat candy or or any food designed to actually showcase the glucose molecule, as the food will actually lodge into the Detection Base (or “tooth”) and cause the circuits to overload which may crash your calendar application, and shortly after lead to deep draughts of whiskey.

UPGRADES:

Future iterations and upgrades of the Sugar Alarm include:
-Alarm that detects and is activated by room temperature air
-Alarm that detects and is activated by own saliva

i think everything’s gonna be okay but i have to map things out so i can move on full steam. i need a schedule. i need a team. i need a medivac crackerjack with a hacksaw and a dream. i need a tattooed third-eyed coffee-girl to wake me up with cream. i need a doe-toed plum-tongued bronze-strummed woolly velvet butter-laden seam. ooohh the ibuprofen did its magic for the moment and cut me off from the squirming static shaddering from a broken molar radio tower. and i even think that before long if i juggle my jobs and obligods right, i can strain out enough to lure the dentist into lending me his esteem.

for father’s day i got a puppy. luna got me a puppy. well, not really. more accurate would be to say that luna became a puppy for father’s day. that is, she peed on everything. she’s potty trained, but not fully independent with it. i must have forgot to have her go before bedtime, so she peed in my bed. and then the next morning on my chair, my computer chair. and the floor in my room as she hopped off the chair. it’s my fault. i didn’t adhere to the schedule of stops she needs to keep herself dry. in the end, she peed in so much stuff that i had nothing left to dress her in, and had to dig into the jumble in the closet to find something. so i spent most of the day doing laundry and scrubbing things and still it smells like pee to me. it may just be my overstimulated olfactory nerves but i’ll do some more cleaning tomorrow just to make sure everything is…well, not “golden,” but yanno. clean. what a day. yeh. when i realized she peed on my chair i just had to laugh.

pain and urine. it’s a sunday to soak into. and isn’t today some kind of holiday?

salud!

“Nezua:

It was so humid in Atlanta.

I grew up in ________, born and raised, and so perhaps there is something about that weather that speaks to my skin. Just before the awards dinner, I was walking from the train to my hotel and the sky was tangled with clouds and there was so much drama in the sky, a drama that the fluid ______ Area winds always erase. It makes it easier here to breathe, to take thoughts that rise up and let them go. When I left my hotel again to walk the two blocks, the sky had burst open and the rain fell so hard it almost seemed to be splashing up from the ground. I shared an umbrella with an old colleague and we both got half-soaked, so the rest of the night in that banquet hall the skin of my back was chilled until we left again.

Atlanta in June has that sweat-drip, that hair-curl.

I guess I’m trying to figure out why I am thinking about what it would be like to kiss you. I guess I’m trying to blame it on the rain. I didn’t think clearly about it until I was on the elevator back up to my room: that I should have walked you out, that we should have spent the night talking more, touching each other perhaps, because why not?

Yet, this feels silly, immature, email flirtations are such mental masturbation. I fancy myself a writer so it’s easy to sit here at my desk and write off your clothes, write my teeth against your nipples, your cock grazing the top of my mouth, sliding into the tight of my throat.

It feels good to write about this because I am in the middle of trying to figure out how to articulate my position on monogamy. So, I hope you forgive me this diatribe … but as the object of my desire, somehow you seem the most likely candidate for being my sounding board. Highly inappropriate really.

The truth is I’m not sure what to think about monogamy. If I had kissed you, I would probably still be writing this email … still using the spark as a catalyst for this thought process. Even though we barely shared a hug or two, I still thought of you when making love to my partner the other day.

I am finding the line incredibly inconsistent in my mind. Liminality. Boundary crossing. It’s hard to give it up. …

And now, I – too – am getting married. So, my quest over the next few months is to figure out how to stand up in front of my friends and family and articulate myself: all the complexities of myself. Or perhaps that is not the point at all.

I’ve suddenly lost the thread. There’s cool air blowing again.

This was just a first attempt, but it’s past midnight now and I want to crawl into bed, try to get straight in my head all the tasks I have for tomorrow and maybe save that levitating space before the fall to imagine back into a sultry night I could have had….”

From the Nectarine Meat collection of poems. Soon I’ll post a download link to this album in its entirety.

From fever of peace.

i realize that my father has writing where i’m pretty sure he uses this line in a poem…but x is my generation and this xicano will take it from here. . .

From the Nectarine Meat collection of poems. Soon I’ll post a download link to this album in its entirety.