we're told to "be strong," when everything about our anatomy points to vulnerability, once you begin to understand the tightwire display of each day, how our body navigates space and equalizes itself, among the tides of other bodies in the same tenuous state of balance

sketch/fragment (dawn)

if you can imagine

dawn
a cleaving ellipse
hinge of a door
on which
hangs a name
known
by more
than just birds

how the blood
strains
through clawing
nerve ends
etching out canyons
screaming to feel
with depth

what is darkness,
what is day,
and what is not in doubt

this room, surrounded by the detritus of trying. life makes its way in stillness. a valley buried in silt, a womb flooded in heartbeat. this is still where you must live. and trying leads to more loss and less determined destinations. roads wave in and around your central point, your magnetic and true north, your magnetic field of flow; roads turn and tumble in mountain dusk, and take away sounds, ideas, metaphors, essays, work, love, lives, trees, simple things, complex thoughts, effort and lethargy. freeways stacked twelve high ring in the new year sky bold as cracking bells with the temerity to sign a name across a dusk-laden street. you always know what time it is. you never know what time is. when you grew you figured in absentia that time was no more than a thought, a thought to contain or constrain the body into which said thought was born and into which said thought decayed into lumps of wet sand, crashed up on beaches full of brilliant ideas, rooms full of expiring sediment. i want to crash and disappear, like a wave, to explode and glimmer and quietly pull back into myself, to reflect the sun without shame or limitation, to shed that light back onto a continent

and no one laughs
at such a divine comedy

no trees to hide our transgressions

(reading: e.e. cummings - 73 poems)

I dreamt of ex-girlfriends and motels in the desert

I smoke a short cigarette and read in damp cool Sunday air, my mind never very far away from responsibilities that have nothing to do with smoking or reading. And when I am studying my geology or philosophy, I day dream about smoking a short cigarette and reading. I think about how this is life, how mundane it all becomes, realize somewhat begrudgingly and with some hope that this is not where it all ends up. But it is not where anything begins either. Stuck in between a beginning and an ending. It is easier when something vast and mysterious begins to have hope; when some crazy epoch nears its end you can daydream wistfully about how you will take your new clarity with you and do things differently. In the middle, there is nothing to hold on to.

as if
existence were little more
than a wish
to know
what is means to be at home
in America

the night birds find
the face of the moon
to their liking

if everyday could be like morning

as if
one could watch dew
with little more than sense

straddling fences unburned

man gets too tired to care but stays up all night to feel the cold and creaking silence of night's shrinking armor just before dawn

something
that means something
beyond meaning

rarely do i belong to one who isn't missing

this is the earth that turns
too quickly
beneath feet, rails, and wheels
to consider
the incomparable distances
between men

we build up our muscles for waiting

in the heart of a truly living summer

blades of grass look up and reflect everything that i cannot