October 15th, 2009

October 9th, 2009

October 6th, 2009

A full moon.
Snow.
Meadows. Ridges. Animals. All now blanketed.
Night world the color of pooling mercury.
Eyes afire.
Suggestive, provocative adventure.
Go.

The wheels of the mind spinning faster faster faster while my arms - monsters looking to snatch glorious chunks from this world - rip out speed limit signs by their impermanent cement basements. Mind please do rewrite the rules as fast as you fucking can! For, this boy is flying -- the adventures so big that he can’t walk from one to the next.

I stand beneath a sky that is clearing. The tail of the storm winks a goodbye and invites one to go out walking in its wake. Porous inspiration that licks at nerve endings. We gather and blaze out across the meadow, charging through the sage -- the canvas blank means our legs are the sharpened pencils on this white sheet of paper. Write this life a story! We climb out of the valley, our lungs the magic carpet that wafts us to lookout after lookout. Resplendent eyes - I’m seeing and believing - light belly fires. Pumping furnace. Clouds tear apart like lovers at an airport. Peaks, cocaine white and fifteen miles distant, bright as a woman’s jeweled eyes, blast onto the scene. Dark timber oozes here and there. A ridgeline runs a now bright finger down your spine. Sightlines for miles. Still airs. Nothing looks the same twice. A black creek feeding a blacker river. Their paths lazy threads that suture the parts of you that are torn. We move and this night world moves with us. Shadows are people you’ve known. Highlights are people you now know. Jagged aspen are naked, their limbs now revealed to be roots - crippled and airborne soldiers. Slip through a break in the trees. Climb. Descend. Pick up another vial of magic and hook it down. Notch the belt. Celebrate good and ostentatious perfection. Hump your fertile memory -- may it never forget! Stumbling over beauty so apparent that absence is the trip. Mumbling thanksgivings to yourself with each breath that isn’t sonorous laughter at your living good fortune. Trying not so much to make sense, but rather to remember: anything. DOB. Name. Place of first loved kiss. Attempting to target what can be seen as sanity because lo! This evening is all bent on blowing your mind. I am alive, standing in a wilderness and thanking each appearing star for the power beneath my feet, the space I occupy -- this, the sonic stillness, all but forgotten bit of marvelous that lies between the Tetons and the Winds.

October 4th, 2009

September 30th, 2009

September 29th, 2009

It is pouring outside, the water falling from heaven at a strong, inescapable rate. I sit safely beneath a roof listening to its fuzzy and consistent patter. What I hear is a sound that cannot be duplicated. a car moves up the block, headlights acting as modern lanterns pitching back and forth in tandem. Soundlessly, the machine stops and Wanda, her cigarette in danger of being extinguished with as much water is raining down, steps from the cab. As she erects herself on the ashen curb, she exhales...

September 24th, 2009

A black and white boy seeing full full full color...

September 22nd, 2009

Writers as titans, gods, a god, seaons. Afternoon majesty found in unrestricted thoughts -- a mind powered by deeply muscled legs attached to an ass [sic].The leaves have grown bronze - their summer kissed skin and mine sharing momentary tone - and gold, matching the plentiful wealth of my fall smile. The shadows of clouds, splintering long traveling sun lights, ooze down old, stony mountains faces like a liquid, like a gas. All ridges, valleys and filament thin rivers are light and dark, full of good woman contours. A deeply timeless and golden wind rouses itself. The sun, having waited all summer, paints the world with her imbibed orange hue. Listen friend for the snorting crash of moose through the brittle, dying floor of your earth. (To hell with it!) See six a.m. geese weave tapestries - sinuous and tight - as they follow the river’s contours up upstream, behind them that rising ball of light clambering skyward once again. Close your eyes and sense death - a mutinous tree leaving its ranks for sweet, fecund decay on the forest floor. I am here and here is good.

September 13th, 2009

The 21st century is here and flooding me with all sorts of wicked memorandums about keeping this life quite intoxicating. My 8000 ft. paradise beats your 8000 ft. paradise, I promise. For me, me is freebasing lines of love from EVERYTHING. Me is sneaking room to room in search of what is apparent. Me is catching laughing reflections, the sorts of which cause me to feel quite focused and singular. Sun comes, shines and fades. Satellites vacillate above and I am left to sift through this earth in search of the astral. Nice.

September 12th, 2009

September 11th, 2009

“This didn’t have to happen,” I said.

“It didn’t, but it did,” Wanda replied as she set her bottle of beer down on our glass coffee table.

Glass on glass, I thought. Two same surfaces.

The show came back on the t.v. and we sat there again in silence pulling at our beers. I couldn’t figure out why were were watching the television rather than loving each other. It was a thousand nights like these that had brought us to this one. And this one wasn’t like the others; this is the one where she had said, almost on the sly as though she didn’t want the neighbors or God to hear, that she was leaving.

I asked her if she meant to the store. She said “No, I’m leaving you and this and every night we’ve sat here together.” I had been hoping she would have said to the store. We needed coffee and I needed a toothbrush.

“Alright,” I replied. “Do you want me to ask you to stay?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Alright.”

As the box before us rumbled into a moment of laugh track, I suddenly wished that I was outside - out of my house, my box. I reached down and retied my shoes. Wanda glanced at me, her eyes almost looking curious.

I stood up and proclaimed, “If you’re not going to the store, I am.” Before she could mouth a response, I had stepped out the door and into night. I took a breathe - my first outside breath - and looked up. The clouds were a blurred wash of orange, lit from below by the ten thousand lights all cities leave on. Tonight I didn’t mind the electric waste. Tonight I needed the color orange.

Three blocks later I realized I hadn’t brought any gloves. It was cold enough out to make me regret that. But I couldn’t go back. She was leaving and I couldn’t go back.

I walked a mile to the river without a thought. A train was coming. I loved how the tracks ran along the river. Trains had beaten the throngs to this city. Far off the engine sounded like the soundtrack to a nightmare. It bellowed and feigned and swooped dangerously close. I could lie comfortably on those tracks. I’ll bet the steel is warm and inviting. I could lay my hands on those tracks to warm them and then let the train take them.

Waiting for the train to pass - to see it light the backsides of all the buildings that line the tracks - I felt like a child. I knew that I was. I knew that was why she was leaving. I wished for a beer and then I wished for maturity. I wanted to see trains pass in the night. She wanted, --fuck, I don’t know what she wanted.

The locomotives moved past. Two of them, soot stained and orange in the dark. A man stood on the back deck of the second. He had both of his hands wrapped around the railing. He wasn’t going anywhere; he was going away. I thought of waving; I thought that would be stupid. I thought: I am man standing in the dark looking at a train wondering whether or not he should wave. I kept walking.

I crossed the tracks without looking. I knew I was safe, the train having just gone by. I could smell the water now. It didn’t smell dirty, it didn’t smell clean. Two figures huddled quietly ahead of me. Like the train, they were coupled. Their cigarettes glowed weakly. I passed them and I wondered if they were thinking of waving. We never do.

Wanda would have waved. Wanda would have waved thinking nothing of what she was doing. I loved that about her. Wanda would not have liked the water though, Wanda would have begged me to turn around, walk parallel, anything but right to the edge.

I walked to the edge.

The river was moving so slowly. It was a dream river. Any other night but tonight it would have been moving more quickly, with at least a bit of desire. That it was moving at all seemed surprising. Why? Water is always moving - if only just a bit. It is a constant. It is reliable. I could learn something from water.

September 10th, 2009

3/4 Dudefest '09.

Nick

Finn

Matt

September 8th, 2009

Those with sobriety holding a drink out to those without. An uncontrolled (read: completely fucking unhinged!) blue sky opens a day that you know is going to crash, crash, crash, crash. It always does, what with us chewing up each little chunk of time to better spit out the dark of night.

September 3rd, 2009

On Conversation.

The clap of feet molesting floorboards.
Throats scraped by voices moving from room to room
like secrets through the compartments of a mind that wants dearly to shed a burden.
A wordy ringmaster trying to grip the sirens of language that wail in circles around him.

September 2nd, 2009

I decided to go get high...

August 31st, 2009

August 24th, 2009

August 20th, 2009

There is no word for the point at which the road ends; meadows, hills and mountains lying in wait, twitching earnestly like the massive fleshes of a draft horse. But, it does end. The crushed and melted, tarred and shaped byways which we’ve ribboned the world with are bounded -- smoke we’ve created and locked in a glass case.

Beyond the hard pack lies living and the arts contained therein; that other world where we glimpse at gods and crack grins that are altogether genuine. (Some can smile on this earth, others smile only when they’ve reached the other.)

You step away from wherever it was you thought you were and a soft wind immediately strikes up, the grasses catching that invisible friend, asking it to weave amongst them. They bend at the waist out of deference for a granted wish. The sun sits in the sky, a big comforting, blocky mess. A river stirs, the water a bright, bejeweled thing -- a hundred thousand coins flipped heads over tails all at once. Mountains you’ve never seen loom. From a distance, the white breasts of birds that seep from the cracks in podium rocks lining the waterfall appear as flinting sparks thrown by a river in plunge. Their wings snarl and snap, tangling about with the infinitely crushing sound of the falling.

Do lungs bellow the legs or do legs pump the lungs?

I am hungry and I want to fly.

LIVING MEANS STEPPING beyond the consecrations of pavement. It is deciding that what comes next is a trip into the beyond. Temporal mind take us by the reins that we refuse to relinquish. SEE not what comes next but what is happening now. Believe that which seems real.

Fingers peck out letters in a civilized order and the grins form at the corners of readers who don’t know any better.

Ha! Writers as magicians.

Suppose I’m done. Poof.

August 19th, 2009

The sun ends the day. Trees as conductors waving branch batons in marvelous syncopation.

August 16th, 2009

We find god when we get high,
when we get old, breaking our backs in supplication over a beautiful day.
My raised arms are the two white lines
of a road on which my body rides the yellow, dotted center.
We kick at the earth, bite, sweat and tear at it like children drunk
on the shadows of their upcoming bouts with unhappiness.
Silence a vapor too quickly taken
by a rising day that wants only what cannot be poured into a drinking glass.
The abduction of things as the savior who paints
the smirk that passes for a smile that passes cutting and arrow-like through all worlds.

August 5th, 2009

Pictures. Pictures as worth a word times one thousand. Bullshit. Words, words are worth the paper the picture is printed upon. Wait. I’ve had enough of soft shoed ants that rasp their tales without voice across the peeling bark of stout aspens. I’ve taken my sweet fill of winds that taste of dust and rock, space and pragmatic silence. The moon rises, the moon falls, the black tumors of clouds that pass across its collected face scream all sorts of silent goodness. Without we are with and with we are nothing but rapturous beings in possession of balmy and steady afternoons. The heroes our parents warned us about are in full swinging bliss, socking it to you with planetary eyes that reek of white moonlit cracklings.

August 1st, 2009

July 12th, 2009

July 6th, 2009

The road is a blank page, a sky without cloud, a voice without face, a love without hand holding, a smile without eyes, -- it serves your purpose and all others, but so completely are you at its mercy that it is without personality or interdependence. Definition can elude those who travel mighty distances slowly. I am a lucky one -- a boy born to trapeze from here to there with a grin that unravels as slowly as 3211 miles of right lane bliss. Reality bifurcates with each twist of the wheel, with each highway, byway, interstate and main street taken. The motor - a pinnacle of humming ambivalence - gives nothing to no one. It is the best of mindless companions. I’m not sure how I do it or why -- pushed to explore by everything that has come before me and everything that will come next.

I live in this world, I truly do. My mind clutches at a reality that unfolds scarily and completely without precedent. I leave my home, my family, my place of being, my understanding, for all that I can’t possibly know but still must have.

Insatiable. Insane. Inimitable. Interminable.

I am back in Wyoming to watch the end-of-day sun suck gold from the grasses of the field. My mind sails out across the blue mountains and red rock hills. Darkness cannot trample the color of each lived moment. Silence cannot flush into the open that which is already its own galaxy. Space cannot give those without reach anything new to grasp.

This is me and me jumps for joy.

*photo courtesy of A. Tendick*

July 4th, 2009

Great Falls, MT.

Everything is brick. Everyone looks one drink in. The Great Plains are said to commence here beneath thunderclaps and ceaseless winds. The holiday moon is finally high enough in the sky to matter -- lo! how it took hours for it to reach a stature considered untouchable and pure above the piddling night fireworks. The streets are damp, the puddles resting silently until morning; centers full of starburst reflection, edges shuddering with each thumping mortar shell. With summoned energy, I can broach the idea that the humorless, if broad, Mississippi flows less than a hundred feet from where I type this script. A wide, rather intangible reality shapes being on the road and being here: six straight days and only now I sight the end. ME. ME. ME. Me rides into this town amidst gusting winds and baseball raindrops that blows purely sideways. Heat lighting takes cracks at a big-earth-fucking sunset. The elemental gods battle and we the people shiver, turn up our collars and duck our heads in quiet servitude. Now, now roman candles pour themselves through deep pitchers of darkness to reflect off the cheap plastic finish of a nameless hotel lamp and I find myself drifting to sleep in the hollow blackness of this massive, contiguous state.

June 29th, 2009

It takes a good friend...

June 28th, 2009

June 26th, 2009

5240 ft. today and it had just begun to snow...

June 22nd, 2009

June 21st, 2009

June 20th, 2009

And so we slip through our days ignoring not what isn’t but what is. Minus any haste, the sun disappears behind orange mountains. Oil derricks - god’s mechanical monsters - materialize like un-satiated man's mirage. Airplanes tear through the golden sky, propellers chewing at reality. The oceans laps patiently at waiting rocks. The gulls are puppets - knifing and ripping at gravity, their movements jagged and without premonition. Language seems terribly trite, an invention of those who haven’t seen this. Wind scours the skin, tussling the hair and mind. Reality as completely formed and willing to crush anyone foolish enough to fully indulge.

June 16th, 1009

A river surges down the valley I climb up,
thundering over rocks like a thousand galloping horses pushing easily across the earth.
I imagine the animals, born from the the same lake that births the river at valley’s end,
their muscle and bone and snorting breath,
streaming out into crushing existence with wild, bloodshot, fuck all snarls of freedom.
The sun sits motionless on the western horizon for fear that if it moves,
it will spook the horses and be itself trampled until there is nothing left.
Endless night will ensue.
Though I am in no danger because I can fly,
lifted up and away by the drafts of so many imagined animals,
immune and able to float safely above their percussive hooves,
these imagined beasts, and their consequences, terrify. .

June 12th, 2009

June 8th, 2009

I live on the fringe, the margins - The all important space between bulk and nothing. The footsteps of being alive and ostensibly well are swallowed languidly and deliciously into a milky, opaque void that surrounds. I climb a mountain; slowly, in this the 21st century of madness, everything fades. I walk into the clouds. I am living and being. I am feeling. I am an orchestrator - one who composes and arranges and flosses beautiful entanglements between the teeth of a reality that, while fragmented all to hell, is beautiful. So up, up I go to a peak that is somewhere unseen. The high tundra beneath my dancing feet a patchwork of subtle, rusty colors and inch tall plant life. Sight is 75 feet in all directions. Things materialize. Things come into being. Things float in from the infinite white ocean beyond to become. I am the center of this universe. My lungs inhale. My legs pump. My sweet body and mind are being comfortably carted to a place all their own. So up, up I go. Shrouded in thought, I am forced to concentrate because I am actually climbing a mountain and I have actually just walked into the clouds. Birds - choreographed stones that defy our gravities, I can hear birds, winging themselves through the air. None can be seen, but their voices (the twine that keeps my globe raveled) are there. Around and around. They fly around and around. My voice swallows itself so I do not speak. The ridgeline is narrow. The air is thick and thin. Water that hangs soaks my skin. There is now silence. No wind. No birds. Rock, jagged and forceful rock, roars a passionless but intense kind of white noise. In my periphery, snow melts, oozes, slips, glides and ebbs by. I am closer to the sun. There are now peaks beneath me -- spires, gaunt and terrible, row after row after row, tease for never will they allow anyone to conquer them - too fragile and wicked are they. One boy on one big hill in one little universe. Wake up, this is life’s dream.

June 6th, 2009

June 3rd, two thousand and 9

May 27th, 2009

the bookstore.

your same three words,
same three words
same three words,
over and over again,
because there is a girl
and she [you hope],
she is reading her same three words
over and over again,
not seven feet away.

May 24th, 2009

May 22nd, 2009

"...with helicopters overhead."

May 20th, 2009

May 14th, 2009

Believing as we do in our overflowing, illicit natures - peoples without relief - is employment, a type that requires the worker not to think but rather to act wholly with body and mind. There is a great division, a ditch much like the one perpetrated between animals and men, that we cannot seem to leap, ostensibly because it is thick with the black smokes of racing locomotives that beat back and forth between the edges of known existence like iron block pistons powering a macabre, inescapable nightmare machine . Each day brings us into the thinking or not thinking world. Ours is a choice. To passively absorb imagination is to be open, willing and active. Caressing the days into lifetimes isn’t as complicated as we make it seem, rather it’s the living that kills us.

May 12th, 2009

May 7th, 2009

May 5th, 2009

In those sweet, not-long-ago-days when I felt like the valley of my life was broad - a place carved by retreating glaciers rather than ripping rivers or creeks - there was an updraft to all currents; the type you see eagles and their shadows riding as they ease themselves up over 4000 ft. ridgelines and across the face of the moon. Always did I feel praise, always was I riding some invisible airs out over my open and visible space.

In no time at all, the machinations of this world have begun to stir their engines, clicking and whirling their syncronous and oily gears in my ears. The noise is egg shell thin but deafening, like a hundred mountain sheep all scurrying up the same shale slope while you stand rigid and watching, still stunned by the ripping hawk that passed in the vacuum created the moment the wind died.

I find myself believing in certain things and not others. I find myself thinking that this ok. I feel as though I have begun to plant the trees that will shade me and my daily flowing waters of thought from all that wishes to beat at the door in demand of a meeting.

I wander now with a strange and scared new sort of consciousness. Always there must be an exit -- a quick movement of mind and body that will have me slashing safely back in the shallows - darting into the grasses with a whisper of my wings and settling my feathers with easy alarcity like those men who flick their wrists to note the time.

Where does what you believe come from?

Which mountaintop relays the signal best? Can I get it in my valley?

I feel as though I have been cast in a mold and placed in the hot sun to cement; as my pose on this stage solidifies and becomes more permanent, do I take solstice in the safety of refuge, of definitive order and place, or do I continue to long for the open space in which I could see all and all could see me?

May 1st, 2009

April 28th, 2009

These sharp fragments of time are twinklings not from the eyes of women but from the sweet indefinites of the sea. Raise your arms in victory because this is the day and it has been made. Don't pick at threads, they are the slowly unraveling dreams that spool from the reel that is your head. Inimical, rampant creatures can't find their way down streets without signs so I suppose it doesn't hurt if you follow their rules too. Dead end? Hardly.

April 26th, 2009

Silver. Purple. White. Blue. Gray. The ocean one thousand plus feet below me shimmers a mad shake in a dress dipped in just those colors. The tides are waaaaay out and the mud flats are a thudding, flank steak brown sliced up for consumption by small nickel colored streams flowing out to sea. Wind whips up the hillside. The sun is a machine pumping out light. So bright, light so bright. Shield your eyes! Through mud, snow and the sweet dead grasses of seasons tumbled into proper memory, I dance, careful to step in and through the sun as it picks its way through lanky, thin-hearted birches. I am here and breathing in air that comes from nowhere I’ve ever been. These blue-backed mountains support my wanderings morning, noon and night. If I spin they are all around, creeping down from low clouds and rising up from the seas, they float - tender arrhythmias that want not for an audience. The clouds mix the sky another drink. They tell me to just be happy for I’ve slipped up another safe and still mountainside.

April 21st, 2009

There is a current - a thread too thin to be plunked, too integral to unravel. Days take shape, animals blink their eyes and it flies soundless and benevolent. It comes in with the tide, spreading itself thin and naked upon muddy beaches that reek of wet, dense earth. It pulls unbeknownst at those willing to listen. It is a whisper small enough to hide in the ebbing bark of birch trees. It courses, it churns, it seems to be moving not all. It is the size and color of a prairie house fire seen in the night from many miles -- you travel closer along a black strip of highway and the fire grows - from star to constellation to galaxy. It is long-slanting, arctic sky sun that at once seems orange and white. It is purple, early spring Alaskan air that you breathe and swallow. It is a dancer that wafts in and out of spinal column treelines that sketch across blue rock mountains. It is air without undue scent. It is water without taste. It is inoffensive because it is clean. It is a learned smile. It is the smoky tailings of a volcano waving its hand for it at once knows the answer. It is willing. It is patience built by blocks of meekness. It is fresh cut spruce that clings to your jaw line and attracts women who dare hug you. It is dirt under the nails that comes from hands pitched into the ground. It is massive, enduring silence. It is sobriety and the knowledge that sobriety brings. It is water that never stops to rest. It is a sky of bulbous stars that looks like the lit bellies of swimming pools. It is laughter heard by those who want to laugh. It is happiness. It is a raised moose head that drips water you can actually hear. It is a thousand singing geese that wander into the third dimension and frame themselves soaring and pink in the late night April dusks. It is the shadow of leafless birches connected to all other shadows, all other birches. It is groundwater that cannot sink into the earth but only flow out to sea. It is the dead yellows of grass, the grays of ash over said grass, the invisible air that hovers atop that. It is a raven come to sit in a treetop and watch the watcher. It is his sighing wings. It is a spoken hello and an unspoken hello. It is intuition that flows powerfully down veined forearms. It is endless days and churning not because you don’t know but because you do. It is love for someone you will always have the privilege of loving.

April 14th, 2009

This city as a roaring set of gears screaming for oil, screaming for all the anythings it can grab. Sound steals your hearing. Lights, bitter and bright, work at your eyes. The dusty tailings of exhaust fumes dig into your tender, sweetly pink lungs. All else is a splint that the mind must defend against tenaciously. This place is a paradise only for cranks. It promotes shallow breaths taken cautiously with white-gloved care.

The broken beat voices into cell phones. Their shoes are worn thin, their bellies fat; sallow arms the tentacles that wave about, reaching recklessly like a child for something on a shelf.

This place is a cloudy, undrinkable solution; a bloated king on a throne. It is a place out of its mind. Supply feeds demand while demand simply demands. This is the height of civilization? This is what we’ve come to? Our pinnacle?

The city is a parent you cannot escape. It is a straw on the lips of a vacuum. Human artifice has been born and is now driving [comfortably] around. Words such as silly, impotent and gripping label the rocks clanking along at the bottom of interstate highway rivers. Unremitting – a wolf pack waiting out a pinned, frozen riverbank moose, this place is just too damn much.

I do love being alive. Sober and soaring above tree line, I am full of comprehension. Here though, here I am a stranger, weighted with observation and numb as hell. Yet, it isn’t all just rose ripped from the ground by pernicious little buggers.

To wit:

The sun breaks camp and heads somewhere else. I watch it disassemble tent poles and stamp out the fire of day while sitting on the shore of Lake Washington. High above, tractor trailers driven by women and cars driven by men, float across a bridge. Their lights wink on stubborn and yellow on as the bellies of the clouds go from gray to pink to gray. A pair of geese and a lone pelican flit across my movie screen eyes. The table at which I sit accepts the drumming of conversation and fingernails. Smiles are summertime sparklers lit, held, burned up, discarded and lit again. All is well and [somehow] stable on these spring shore waters.

April 10th, 2009

Many days have passed, but finally, I wake up in a city. Pavements and people and the bumpy, endless streets of all things both loud and unnecessary - unnecessarily loud - clog senses that are cotton soft. I count siding slats on the house next door while waiting for water to boil. A woman comes to her sink and waves while she gets her own water. Why is it the more layers we build, the less insulated we feel? Why am I a voluntary prisoner standing 12 feet and two walls from another? Our tasks are the same; our lives connected only through the stillborn, indoor oxygen we are both breathing.

Get us away from countless digital clocks and humming appliances, car keys and wallets. Someone please take our hands and lead us into the high desert prairie where we can recognize the meaning of space. Let our shoulders smell of sage, our hands of crushed juniper berries. Let the wind move from visible and distant mountains all the way into your lungs! Clouds will sit so high that you’ll have enough space to dream! There will be no earthbound, punishing, internal fogs to wade through in the mornings! Instead, we will rise with the sun that is slowly being cranked - at an angle called impossible - into the sky! Ever distant and flaming, it will follow us around all day! Tugging at the still malleable spots in our heads like a puppy on the other end of a rope you cannot put down, it will ask us to simply appreciate.

Welcome to the grieving plains of this America. I’m here to guide you. When all is ready, we'll go.

As a species we’ve hardly gone anywhere and somehow feel accountable for that [supposed] flaw. Hello over-compensation. We build and hide and pray that the world won’t crash today or tomorrow; god, that would be embarrassing. We are kids using last year’s, partly trampled science fair project because we surely haven’t come up with anything appreciably new. The kinks iron out. The band strikes up. The show goes on.

Slowly, someone slides a big chunk of light into the gray sky stew of this Pacific Northwest morning. A garbage truck slogs by. I am not happy with this. I can see a maple tree - covered in moss born from delicate and wet airs - blooming, but it doesn’t strike me as unstoppably beautific. I’ve slipped away from the mountains -- slipped all the way downriver into the surfeit, urban delta. With roiling eyes the color of weather, I am once again asked to take it all in.

When people ask: where are you, what am I to tell them?

A gray jay flits to the window finding something in the slowly molding sill worth a few arrow beaked pokes. His movements appear quick-tempered, irascible. It occurs to me that we both possess the same level of prescience. He flies away, landing in the maligned maple. He is a dark star on a limb in a growing, green sky.

These are nothing but words and I am nothing but a traveler who sprinkles them over the lands I’ve covered in hopes that just one will find purchase, root and bloom. Each tap of the keys, each scribble of the pen, makes things both easier and harder -- I gain knowledge, I learn, I fills burlap sacks with invisibly heavy loads of responsibility.

Firs, one hundred and three feet tall and soon to have me beneath them, arch their backs, and like a coat hanger untwisted then re-twisted, never quite get back to being completely straight. They are sentinels, long ago cemented as relics - the peoples before there was us.

I suppose I need shoes if I’m going to wander around with you people.

April 7th, 2009

Somewhere beyond, a raven blats on and on, attempting to take a bit more early season heat from the air here at day’s end. Dogs, fed and watered, find the first splinters of early evening shade. The birds, numerous as pebbles flung from a child’s hand and lingering dreamlike in the sky while deciding upon what design to pattern a still lake, fit sound into available space. The temperature sails upupup and away. My naked feet send my head the idea to dance dance in the warmth. Let us call this action spring -- or, the survival of winter. Today everything is awake and making shadows.

April 6th, 2009

This Last Day of March 2009

Doves make nice in the distance
as the sun sets to an accordion of thought words that squeeze.
Madness, patience and glaring, deep hole exclusion
[or consent] for this once upon a time world
are my reminders of what was.
A finger slides across the shift key,
1,000 stories stumble from the pockets of my brain groggy,
scattering themselves across the ground fecklessly
like seeds flung by March birds still wintering at your feeder.
Building permits are for those not handed bricks of life.
Far away, the trees are blue and the storm clouds suck at those planted on high.
Dusk a settling factor in the tapering of this workday.
I am somehow back,
sucking on gin flavored ice cubes that taste as bright as my previous life.

78 days at the Darwin...

"My guess would be that someone someday will trace the roots of modern human loneliness to a loss of intimacy with place, to our many breaks with the physical Earth. We are not out there much anymore. Even when we are, we are often too quick to take things in." -B. Lopez

For those interested, my reading list was as follows:

George Orwell - Animal Farm*
Leo Tolstoy - The Death of Ivan Illyich
Jack Kerouac - Desolation Angels*, The Dharma Bums*, Big Sur*, The Subterraneans, Lonesome Traveler*
Rick Bass - Brown Dog of the Yaak*, Winter*, In The Loyal Mountains*
Barry Lopez - Light Action in the Caribbean, Arctic Dreams
Seth Kantner - Ordinary Wolves
David Quammen - Song of the Dodo
Tom Wolfe - The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test*
Dave Eggers - How We Are Hungry*
Ayn Rand - Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead
Tom Robbins - Half Asleep In Frog Pajamas
William Kittredge - We Are Not In This Together
John Krakauer - Into The Wild*
Jonathan Safran Foer - Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
Peter Matthiessen - The Snow Leopard
Ken Kesey - One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Richard Ford - Rock Springs*
Sam Keith - One Man’s Wilderness*
Anthony Doerr - The Shell Collector
Tobias Wolff - The Night In Question*, In The Garden Of The North American Martyrs*
Jim Harrison - Saving Daylight, Returning To Earth

Plus a smattering of shorter works by John Cheever, Flannery O’Connor, Terry Tempest Williams, Hemmingway, Ginsberg, Ray Carver, even some Hunter Thompson for good measure.

All told I probably digested something in the neighborhood of 31,000 pages.

*denotes a re-read.

p.s. I also had time for jams-a-plenty while I was here. Favorites included:

Led Zeppelin - Led Zeppelin II, How The West Was Won (especially disc 3)
The Decemberists - The Hazards of Love (a rock opera, a ropera!)
Pink Floyd - Animals, Obscured By Clouds
Elton John - Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
TV On The Radio - Dear Science
The Beatles - Revolver
Nada Surf - Lucky

March 19th 2009

grok grok grok says the wind to me and my birches. (beneath them I stand -- a statue with eyes that rove the mottled trunks up up up!). sunlight moves in splash frames across peeling, filter the day speckled barks and the unbound, so many root-in-the-air branches.

-blue of the sky why are you the color of los angeles circa 1952? -the trains that whistle to and fro on your great salt surf coasts are simply keeping ribbon rails shiny and pure.

March 18th 2009

In the growing afternoon dusk of a snow swept and terribly sad, indoors Monday, I caught sight of a bald eagle skimming the tips of one thousand lodge pole pine. The wind was fierce, sending angular bits of ice up down left right and there it was, moving massive and silent with a grace no human deserves to see. It lighted on a 112ft. dead spruce and if not for its head of insular white and a beak of solid gold bar yellow, it would have been nothing but a brown lump of bird.

Back home, eagles are not a rare sight. When I was kid, I didn’t know that the rest of the world even had such birds. I thought that they were only in Alaska, which explained their abundance. That isn’t to say seeing one didn’t stop me from whatever I was doing (it always did), but rather seeing one down here gets me truly high and reminds me of both where I come from and what it means to be repeatedly awed by something.

There aren’t many animals left that don’t at least occasionally see human beings or evidence of their cantankerous, destructive wanderings. The eagle seems one that is still ragingly pure -- strange since we’ve plastered it on everything as a symbol of nothing(?).

Where did this one come from? Did it float down from Yellowstone or Glacier Bay, maybe even Banff? Does it winter at 13000ft in a slick hole of rock hearing nothing but the winds of a past, a future? Did it see me before I saw it? Perched as he was, surveying 4 comfortable miles of open meadow, questions are for me while answers are for him.

Following on the heels of that over-anthropomorphized, sky-bound piece of majesty, was a great, chilling incident...I left the window open last night (the temperature has been hovering in the mid-20’s) and god knows it is better if we sleep with real air in our lungs and minds -- the cleaner the air the more supercharged the dream. So, the window was open and I was laying in blackness only occasionally vented by punk bursts of shotgun reds from the dying fire. Right about midnight or so, a fox lit up with a bark.

To hear a fox bark is something of a privilege. Think of a boy who waits twenty years to make a sound, but then add confidence to the noise that comes out. It is a rapturous mix of ardor and irrepressibility. It is awkward and visceral, temperate and regal.

I spring up from the floor, dreaming and completely excited. In the dim, half moon, half star sky, I see the dark shape of him. He is sitting on the stream bank whipping out call after call after call. Soon enough, I hear a reply. It is distant but closing. Like a whistling train taking a wide sweep into the station rather than the straight line, you can hear the other animal finding its way circuitously, carefully, attentively.

It is beautiful to watch roving, ambivalent shapes spill about on a white sheet of snow like so much mercury.

So an eagle and a fox AND a dead shrew brought to me this morning by the cat as I filled his water dish. A present perhaps? A thank you for keeping it alive and company lo these darkest and longest of winter months?

But that is hardly all. Even as I typed the first draft of this piece, something came along to capitalize my thoughts IN A WAY THAT MADE SENSE...I took a break and was sitting outside in the quickly disappearing morning sun. Mid-life Kerouac and a glass of water seemed fulfilling enough. I could hear the drip of eaves and the backroom chattering of nearly unconscious winds. I thought to myself that I was completely in tune with the book, with what was being said and not said. Then I looked up. Not 12 feet from me sat Foxy. He was studying me curiously. He startled me and I in turn startled him. I didn’t move and only his head cocked to the side a bit more. I thought mildly of rabies and then I thought of nothing but beauty. His black whiskers were piano wires, his eyes knife wounds, his paws the oversized ends of legs dipped in liquid coal. His ears were proportionately massive and picking up every sound above and below the snow. His fur was a thousand shades of a color I’ll loosely call red-orange and his tail swung full and long behind him. He wasn’t afraid me and he wasn’t going to become afraid. He awakened me, he invited me through a transom, he showed me what I thought was not.

Animals, unlike us, don’t crave attention. They live lives that, aside from our domestications, render us completely unnecessary. They are beautiful and perfect, in unwavering harmony with the tuning fork that is the world. They know when things are coming and going. They give us that which is the raw spectacle of their lives. They are purer than us. Simpler but more complex. The idealistic tinkering of a reward for their actions are simply the doings of men trying to squeeze the momentums of that which isn’t into that which is. They are irrepressibly alive and we are simply here to share with them. They are wonder. We cannot create them. We cannot fully understand them. We cannot ownership or objectivity. We require so much, too much.

Look at my words, see that they are just words. Know that I am nothing but a placeholder, a vessel that ships thoughts across seas. I am not the hero.

March 14th 2009

If we are anything but beautiful, luscious, force-fed monsters then there really wouldn’t be much of a mess in this world to wade through. Disquietly, I sit in the dark and purrrrr over writings of men long dead or dying. The wind is burning up belts and throwing rods at this 2009 eternal pace of way-too-fucking fast -- these last two days nothing but terrible, unstoppable blowings. At night the cat sits at the window and screeches out a myriad, fearful set of notes that serve to keep us (she and I!) from our own version of being sucked into the tornado. Her bad singing is our lifeline. If those notes were anything but wanton, piercing things, we’d have no tether, no anchor, nothing to keep us on this marginal planet. So, I lay in hell listening to air try and rip the roof off the place shingle by shingle by shingle. How it would love to whistle right through these windows and walls instead of having to stop stop! STOP whenever it ran into one of their city bus faces.

Here the sun can be easily become a completely forgotten figure in the course of just one hidden afternoon. Is it up there behind the wall of poster board gray clouds that seem myopic to the seeing and blind alike? I’m not furious or even angry, and I don’t want my weather to be either. Can I have brightness and 28 degrees please? It would make this one human smile. Curses to the rest whose wants are anything different. Wood needs to be chopped, floors swept, my trails groomed and marked. Overhead cam clouds needs to float their sweet bellies across the blue façade of this wilderness stage. Without perfect weather, I am nothing if not broken.

March 12th. 2009

As the sun sets, meadows, mythic and rolling iced blue, move away from you, out into it all. Heroes standing at earnest attention watch the heat of the day go with a wave and a slingshot glance towards heaven. Goodbye delicately golden southern clouds that are a seemingly edible bliss. Dusk is here. All shadows have ebbed. Evening begins to move. Hushed and cool, it brings a promise of silence and sleep for this world. Next is a moon coming up late, full and guileless. Silver paint splashes the valley and my god! the pool of color looks sleek and proper. Things outside my window are a vibrato electric wave hum hum huuuummming tonelessly three inches above the ground. Do the trees make a move without a breeze? What about the moose, are they wont to slide through the forests on slick rails? The great white orb plunges into the sky without a second thought and all you can do is stare stare stare.

March 3rd. 2009

The day spirals not in the third, but in the second dimension -- flat, as unheeded as actual writing on a sheet of paper in the modern day. Grays tread over everything, their feet tramping movement and demanding stillness. It is a Monday here in America, one that seems to want for nothing. I’ve no mind to complain, the essence of beauty is always found in that which keeps a normality from ever feeling established. Pack up the cats and hike into the woods. The tailings of a weekend’s worth of wind will whip at your hair and dig sweet, cleaning channels down through the roots into your sweet brain. The blacks and whites of insular afternoons spent reading perfectly singular books never dulls me to the point of boredom. I am simply boy in his cabin in his woods all stretched out on the floor and laughing at the sight of a coffee cup out of focus and a worldview clear as any.

Heroes - climbing to peaks shared with animals, who wait for dusk and the moon’s reflection in glassy eyes, let their lungs live out the days gasping for another breath. In three weeks time, I’ll have to patch myself into another network of dreams elsewhere in this great American west. Let the fox steal his way around the house each night without my knowledge. I’ll find his prints in the morning and study them with the curious caution of an animal who feels too much unlike the next. Why are we all trying so so hard not to share the same emotion with others when it is the only instrument that we can properly hold (almost)? Laughter, stoked in the belly and sent riffing up through eternally soot stained pipes, is limitless in origin and destination.

As I fall asleep, the crescent moon - catching my attention like a brass furniture handle that seems lit even when a room is completely dark, begs me to note all that live lives together beneath it. The sheep, stoic remnants that crumble the rock they uplift, sit watching over a meadow that is faintly purple in the moonlight. Moose find safety among the pillbox alders of the river and hear its faint, open water noise in the same moment that their minds turn the sound to a soundtrack for the stars. We are at the mercy of what is ultimately good, not evil.

-------------

But those, those are all just so many words lined up like schoolchildren at a blackboard -- poking and prodding, looking individual and uneven. Today isn’t about any of what I riff at above. Today is a celebration of today. Meek and unassuming, each second rang out with the tick of melting snow as it dripped down eaves...

I stand in a forest of dead and dying pine hearing a woodpecker. His work hangs in the air, echoes taking all direction out of the sound. Somewhere in the dead stillness a stone is dislodged by a striking hoof. The air is colorless. The world doesn’t ask you to define your place. If wise, you don’t wander into it hoping it will give you something. It isn’t there for us to take from. It isn’t something you talk to when you have time, when you feel like it. It is here and asking you to be with it day in and day out.

Fog rolls through the birch that plot themselves, perfectly spaced and winter naked, along the river. I wander through them, peeling bits of thin, wind-slapped bark from their trunks. If it had a taste, I’d call it dry. My ungainly snowshoe steps mingle with moose and coyote tracks. I think of the layers between their feet and the snow - zero. I think of the layers between my feet and the snow - too many.

A lone hawk drifts by on a breeze that I can’t feel. Far above it one of our own birds streaks to some paved landing strip that connects it to something barely edible and deep-fried. The bird is infinitely more romantically fascinating and real than the savage, monopolized idea of human travel. It hangs above me studying my desires with seeming repose. I stand stoic and respectful. This is his space, his river, his grand valley. I am a blight on his scape. I am the rock that doesn’t simply tumble over the edge into the snowfield below.

The sun roves magnetically toward the southern horizon and its end-of-day dance with some thin, honed peaks. The shadows from leafless trees grow tall across the meadow and are a thousand joined rivers that I can later float as sleep beings to spark and catch fire within me. The air stirs, settling down to bed like a dog. I take my time in heading home. I want to capture this piece of land at this time of day. To be in the this world is to be in the world.

Feb. 28th 2009

Either the trees have come for me or I've come for the trees.

Feb. 24th 2009

I saw peoples(!) today for the first time in 47 days. World record (fuck yeah).

Feb. 23rd 2009

He watched the night approaching. Black as the wing of a raven, it slowly curled the last bits of daylight around an elegant finger. He sits quietly, taking sips from a bitter bottle in between breaths, in between the lighting of another yellow street lamp. A man he has known a long, long time pulls up next to the curb on which he sits. The truck he drives must be as old as their relationship. The man on the curb rises and walks to the driver’s door.

“Are we really going to do this?” he asks.

“Do we have a choice, did we ever have a choice?” The voice that pours these two questions is old, one right on the edge of accepting the idea of prison. It has a rapid, rounded cadence, the words tumbling out, rubbing each other like small rocks being flung downstream under a sudden rush of floodwater.

Both men say nothing and exhale. The man outside the truck sets the bottle on the curb and climbs aboard. He feels a sudden, sticky warmth in the cab even though the air outside is only slightly cooler. Beneath them the truck hums quietly; it has been well maintained. Through the cracked windshield, he watches as they move out into the spilled ink evening.

“You know, we don’t have to do this,” says the slightly drunk passenger.

The driver, paying no attention to the words, taps the ash of his cigarette on the window’s lip, out into the night.

After riding the rest of the short trip in silence, they sidle up alongside a chain link fence that is blocks long, disappearing slowly into the night like lengths of fish net spooled into the sea. The truck is put in park, the engine cut. Both sit listening to pop and tap of contracting metal. Neither reaches for a door handle and neither exaggerates a relaxed posture. City light casts a rusty orange pall on the bellies of the clouds forming above them.

Outside, beyond the depths of that metal fence, is a paper mill. It appears brightly lit from every side, venting steam and smell with equal effort. When one looks at it the whole things seems to be shaking slightly as though whatever its produces must be powerful yet somehow contained. Until recently, both men in the truck had been employed in that mill. Now they are not. Now they were planning to kill the man who fired them.

They sit in the truck, waiting a long time for that man. Finally he emerges, cutting across the street in front of them without looking. They begin to follow him. The driver swerves up onto the curb and the passenger opens his door. Dull light from the mill is cut and bound into reflections on the truck’s veering metals. The man is struck and falls to the ground. The action makes a thick, greasy noise. The crumpled form of the victim heaves slightly.

The truck stops, both men stumble out. It is now we realize that the driver is also drunk. They quickly pick up the third man and dump him into the cold, metal bed of the truck. The lumpy sound this action makes is similar to the sound that was made when they hit him.

Three miles later, back at the passengers house, they stop the truck, get out and realize that the man is dead. A small stream of blood moves away from his mouth, pooling in the stamped metal channels of the truck bed. It is the only visible sign of distress. They decide to leave him where he is for it is dark and they have until morning. Stars appear deep in the sky like animal eyes in the back of a den. They pick the bottle up off the curb and make their way inside to continue drinking.

There are places where these things this still happen and if you don’t believe this, you’re a damn fool .

Feb. 13th 2009

It's Friday the 13th. Rock it.

Feb. 12th 2009

Feb. 4th 2009

Above your head, high in the air but somewhere beneath the streaming jets, glints a square, silvered piece of steel, honed on one end to a point. Furiously pure, a decisive tool, it casts a thousand angled bits of clean, reflected sun with each subtle twist of the hickory handle. As you raise it up up up, it momentarily blocks the sun, absorbing all of its direct energies. There is a passing shadow that glides across the ground for free. In this finite, transient blink of time, you can think any thought in the world. I’d suggest focusing on that which lays itself before you.

Bright and pure, smelling ever fresh as it nears the end point of its journey, is a wood round. You count rings and it has you beat. You steal it quick kiss -- no one is watching. You’ve split a thousand and you’ll split a thousand more. But, there is something about this one; something notable in the curvaceous, wavelike placement of its knots; the fragmentation of its partially peeled bark; the bore holes of bugs. Reaching the fulcrum of your backswing, making sure both feet are planted, your arms tense and your body coils. Your train of thought is single, elemental as the air you hold tight in your lungs.

Two ravens fly just feet above the snow one hundred yards away, the air being packed out and away from their bodies by black, layered wings. Moose drink from the open shallows of the river, their dripping snouts moving carefully - as though not to extinguish - between the hot reds and glowing oranges of alders that the late afternoon sun has set fire to.

The maul does most of the work. You serve as a simple guide - a ruddered vessel that creates direction. With a sound like God’s calloused, snapping fingers, one becomes two. With practice, the wood seems to split from the sound and not the action of the blade; seems to be patiently sitting on either side of the block before the lead edge has buried itself.

Fulfillment enters as the air exits. The sun moves behind a mountain. Daylight fades and the sky attains the subtleties of a good dusk.

In the south the sky is bleached nearly white reminding you of where the sun has just gone. It is bright, uncolored. To the north, just above the high ridgeline lies a thin band of pink that will last but a minute. It is the last bit of say that the sun will have. Think of it as a parting shot -- the light moving from the hillside to the air above to nothing, fluttering but for a moment in that special place between rising and falling. The east and west, they are a childish blue, Y-axis spectators of the north/south show.

Feb. 1st 2009 - Happy New Year!

Jan. 27th 2009

Jan. 25th 2009

I awake with the dawn and find snow falling hard and fast. these white days open and close so slowly, the sky never changing color, the whole world bleeding a soft leaden light. I write for an hour and then cannot take it. I must be out in it, I must wander through the trees and become an animal.

I set out, quickly moving up a southern ridge. all the dead pine lean on each other so terribly. they groan softly as they accept their new coats of snow. great spreads of bark have flaked. I touch their smooth, bare trunks. I wonder how much more weight they can possibly bear -- they see the forest floor beneath them, they know what can happen...a fox whips a fat tail of sweet cream yellow and orange onto the trail in front of me. he doesn’t look back. he floats up and out of sight. his thin black legs disappearing one at a time into the powder.

atop the bluff, all is silent. in all directions, the forests roll away into the nothings of whatever is behind this white curtain. you sit and wait for some sound. there is none save for the flakes which land on your arms, your back. you can hear your heart. you can clearly see each crystal universe falling, settling in, joining all the others.

on my our feet again, I move over a hill and scare a family of sheep that is feeding. the young are so small, their horns tiny upward icicles. the male stirs a step towards me while the female remains fixed. I say my hello and move back. this is their home, not mine.

down down down the mountain! I move through the forest atop those trees that are down. they are fat and wide, overhung with great clumps of that which has fallen. I balance on them as I have one thousand times before, the snow spilling out from under my feet. it splays wildly. it has never been touched. I carve out my descent, rapping my hands on the trunks still standing.

I reach the bottom and stop. I hear a woodpecker. I move back into the woods and look for the bark he drops to the ground like so many flakes of pepper. I find it. I find him. he moves with with thudding delicacy that can only be applied to things that are not us. he is so quick and mindful. he seems to easily dodge each falling flake. in this moment, he are I are two solvent creatures humming alone together.

Jan. 22th 2009

Jan. 19th 2009

Jan. 18th 2009

the mild mixing of conscious and subconscious in your mind. the debate between raging shapeless, unseen and adrift vs. hand-holding chorus lines with all those whom make you swelter. this is hardly a new jag but still, it is so freshly minted in my head.

this idea of becoming something. it cannot be done without the help of those around you of those who possess every skill you cannot imagine or dream.

sure, your desk is littered with white sheets of what can be loosely defined as notes. yes, your pencils need sharpening [for your mind has dulled them]. --you are the only one in love with the words you produce and you gape openly at the idea that what you just said may be true.

people don’t care about language, about written realities, about that, which at the end of the day, is still so much oxidation on life’s frame. reality as a weak judge of character.

I am here to realize what I am (and am not) alone. I am not here to be better or stronger or quicker or brighter or more classical than any other.

Jan. 12th 2009

night is a long, formed thing. it happens each day. the last time it happened was today, the next time it will happen is today. --last [sic] night I awoke slowly, space stretching out ahead of me inky and black - the wake of an octopus. it felt as though my first conscious thought took forever -- a train slowing to arrive at the station. I got up and stood at a window watching stillness, watching nothing move. a sound occurs. I began to listen and heard it again; a half pound of flour wrapped in canvas dropped from waist height again and again and again. like someone learning to juggle, the sound was erratic, happenstance. I moved to another room and continued to hear. it was dark and my ears seem doubly strong in the absence of anything seen. a shape appeared at the window. a body with thin legs and puffy tail silhouettes itself -- a coyote, who, has been jumping up and down on stored tables and chairs that are kept all winter in an enclosed sunroom, looking for the out that let him in. I freeze my body and he does not see me. or, he chooses to ignore me and concentrate on his plight. I moved closer to the window and observed him. he moves from ledge to ledge, chair to chair, table to table with the grouped liquid ease of mercury being pushed around on a plate. he is mostly silent, letting out a frustrated, tinny cry only when he falls from a ledge, only when his situation overcomes him. he hops on things like a cat would but falls right off them like a dog. his eyes pick up the moon. he is at once frantic and at once in complete control. wind picks snow off the roof and moves it down around his feet. each step becoming another in the most intricate dance yet invented. I have proof! his tracks are left in the snow!

this morning I awaken [again] and follow his prints out to the barn. I wonder about the cat - it has survived three winters and summers here . her water bowl is frozen and overturned. all her food is gone - the bowl licked clean. I call for her. she calls back, her thin voice as unused as mine. she is fine. she has hidden herself among the tractors and bales and lanterns and hammers and glues and boards and fencing and gloves and cans and stoves and saddles and found animals skulls like she has 1000 times before (and will again 1000 times)...coyotes are brilliant creatures, what then is this particular feline?...my hand strokes her head and she eyes me warily. we are living together in these great woods. --each morning when the sun breaks free of the dawn clouds I catch her sitting motionless and abstract in the sun. I call her to her across the meadow and only her eyes move to find mine. she is a buddha , a fixed centerpiece keeping all the world’s ennui at bay. if she goes then so do I. we must keep Everything at bay.

Jan. 9th 2009

I bought the ticket, now I'm taking the ride...

a.) -15 at dawn in Idaho. truckstop trucks rumbling away behind the frame.
b.)the brigder teton national forest/gros ventre wilderness, wyoming.
c.) on top of grizzly mountain - 5900+ feet looking southwest at grey butte - 5100+ feet.
d.) plates, license.
e.) highway 26 in far eastern oregon.
f.) green tea anyone?
g.) one radio tower atop grizzly mountain.
h.) another radio tower atop grizzly mountain.

Jan. 8th 2009

the sun it is still while the clouds speedway race beneath. --I sit on a ridge that overlooks a great meadow and watch the million watt spotlight of the intermittent sun on the white sheet snow below. the wind is bright, sounding like a thousand beautiful women blowing in your ears. all is quite well.

my gaze moves from the meadow to the mountains - real, sharp and full of storm - which sit up up and away behind. they seem to be gods that release the clouds in staggered starting positions. which one of us is more permanent, mountains or man?

something in me shifts and my gaze continues across the ridge on which I sit. a horned male sheep appears. like that he does! it is a snap of the natural world’s fingers, magic before we invented the word. he is no more than 100 yards from me. I freeze and god’s own grin breaks across the plain of my face. breath breath.

pawing at the snow lightly with my hoof, I prepare to bed down and observe this stick in green and gray plastics that juts from an opposite rock cropping. he holds a cup and is quietly drinking from it. his eyes don’t leave mine. my eyes don’t leave his. the sunlight which flees quickly across the landscape is warm on my sides, is warm on the rock faces and treetops and frozen surfaces of everything. things instantly so bright! so dull! does he see my curled horns? does he see my perfect posture silhouetted against a snowfield one mile distant, hundreds of feet down, all the way across my meadow? let me turn for him and nobly observe the swirling snow happenings below.

I can’t move. I can hear his hooves - clack clack, clack.. I can see a female break the crest of the ridge, joining the male. she is relaxed, breathing simply, simply breathing. has he told all seems safe? how quiet did he say it? my gaze is fixed upon then. my ears pick up the creak of landlocked trees. two birds call to each other and they seem to be only feet away. have I just been invited into something? has the buffer been sanded down?

that silly being who watches me is not meant for these hills. without a roof and trucked food, he would freeze. he seems so happy though to just stare at me while I do nothing. I suppose I am staring at him while he does nothing.

back through the woods as the clouds seal me from the sun. down down down through fresh white snow. my life has been changed. my life has changed. all it took was a simple wyoming thursday afternoon.

Dec. 29th 2008

I stand before a dilapidated but loquacious woman,
a bottle of new year’s eve champagne at stake --
she asks to see my id.
“Smile” she says.
With a king’s pleasure,
my mouth glaciates into a glassy, incumbent grin.
I exit in triumph with the bottle and my face.

Dec. 23th 2008

you wave goodbye to Alaska. you will not be visiting, you will not be giving it your full, hand-clapped attention. --a friend calls it the simple injection of water into an environment and you want to hug her senseless because her words are right manifestations of a windblown and gutter piled reality. laying on the wood floor brings tears that pool and float dirty ships. to not have what you want is to have something you didn’t know you wanted. sorry all, matt main is headed to the desert…then to wyoming…then into his head…

Dec. 20th 2008

night rings silent and black. the visible air which passes in and out of your lungs feeds your mind oxygen that is flavored with feelings of originality. snow taints the ground. you stand rigid in the dark and hear coyotes baying across a desert that is thousands of feet above sea level and just right in line with your thinking head. the invisible air smells faintly of sage and you can still feel the cool, lacking, sunburst afternoon that was carried away by the bursting clack of pheasant wings. --the dog drops a ball and hinted bark at your feet. you pick up his entertainment - holding it in mental thought, holding it in your hand. a great dead tree looms as it has a hundred days before. it is a bleached sentinel that sees the distant town lights swarming ever farther into [sic] your sententious skull. it is a hero that needs no introduction or finite applause. maybe you will capture it…maybe you will capture the crisp limbs that shrug off dry snow with a little help from a friend known as wind…

Dec. 18th 2008

every every! train should move at a thousand blistering miles per hour. I’m done with sane speeds and single digit women. I want shotgun blasts of ferocity and perfect 10’s. if you want to join me then simply raise that hand -- yes, the one that has been out of the classroom for far too long.

Dec. 10th 2008

moon you are faint like
a distant train whistle.
why why do you tease with
such soft light?

can you not see me
seeing you?

soon we will share
more than
sneaked looks, furtive glances.

give us this evening,
shadows lit furiously
by your thin denim blue
silver line sweet magics.

can you see me now,
seeing you?

promise me that you,
you won’t tell a soul
of this, of this.

Dec. 7th 2008

the ravens moves without noise as only ravens do. as he flies away, the sheet of night is flung into the sky behind him - the curtain strings that he tugs upon must be invisible. --so in sweeps night with the sudden scurry of all those who must MUST must get inside, keeping the blackness at bay with slick incandescence.

action! more action is necessary to keep the mind at the outermost wall of you head. no matter how crumbled and beyond sensible repair it seems, that wall always manages to repel even the slipperiest of naked, inflicting thought.

…the light and the that which wants illuminating are one in the same…

Dec. 4th 2008

Nov. 25th 2008

cheap friends as bitter on the tongue as dark wine bought with a collection of dollar bills and deep pocket change.

I will, at some point, be asked to leave a place and die - tragic as it is distant. a thought that has no necessarily outlet or blatant connection to this real wet world. --the day cools off as it grows longer. a man predicts rain and it falls thin, depressing. my thoughts aren’t on my job, my thoughts aren’t on anything.

if you spend all day dreaming then what does you mind do when you sleep?

not knowing what you want to be means you’ve no idea what direction is.

so, welcome to challenge. welcome to frustration. welcome to a thousand doors with knobs a foot above your mighty arms reach. you as an airplane that flies only through turbulence, fog. ideas move so swiftly that to snag one - wrapping your arms around it with the coiled tenacity of a snake - means so so much.

tonight these streets are cool to the touch. one imagines [without too much difficulty] snow falling upon their flat, brushed surfaces. my how we could then celebrate. untouched! tender! fuzzing with silence, they would remain white strip heroes until I inevitably tired and went silently to bed. those around me wouldn’t know what to do. would they look to the sky for more or would they stare at the ground just as expectant? --soon enough my fading blue eyes will track the watery and mountainous lines that we have yet to try and correct.

when asked the question “who are you?” what do you say? how do you spill exposition as surely as black oil pours into another body of water that is being slowly, carefully poisoned? who am I? nothing but a bird with crippled wings that is suddenly realizing that to fly doesn’t mean to fly. I am a submarine responding promptly to the command of DIVE DIVE. --coming up for air may take the life from me that I am supposed to be seeking, replenishing. moods filter through window pains. trucks grind early morning gears. men smoke hard and fast cigarettes. the sonic is the pounding is the absence is the torrential is the fleeting is the megawatt energies that we all suppress because to live now means to control. adult? --as defined by Webster’s and shot from a cannon over a body of tumbling, jagged water, I am not. the emptying of your purse, the selling of all your hands touch means that Palahaniuk was right -- I’m losing it all and gaining anything [everything] right back.

shopworn heroes take notes under the brims of hats that have seen their fair share of wet days. those with eyes of glass and wanton arm and leg movements serve as the sticks that stir the pot of thought that simmers all fucking day in the brain.

what is it called when you watch the watchers?

don’t worry, I’m here and paying my attentive dues.

Nov. 24th 2008

days rolls into night rolls into my head.

each day I must read and write. if I do not, then all of my real world actions grow fuzzy and I detach from them like a balloon just released from a child’s hand and destined for the sky. words are an ally. words allow one to step through their thoughts wholly. --so what though, am I trying to say? the seesaw is never really balanced. the swings move back and forth soundlessly. the taps emanating from a thousand cold walls don’t mean shit.

Nov. 23rd 2008

matt main lives!

the chorus of this day a bit mangy, wind and become able to detail, with science bordering on exact, events that you swear happened to you once, in your life. --our daily sun has taken to setting. there is not a cloud daring to pass in the sky. clear and cold, the glob of orange that leaves us doesn’t seem any warmer than the air that sweeps down into neckline of my jacket. a planet - bright as the child who raised his hand first, is the starting point for a great series of connect the dots that will be played out as evening readies itself for a [hardly] discerning public.

in the company of certain other individuals, I am heroic - able to withstand all, a proprietary being. never does my head feel so good. never does my mouth move out words into a world that seem to make such viable, passable sense. stand waiting for a train and tell me how many times the world stops and starts. theorize that the moment you fall asleep it (the world) goes to pieces only to rebuild itself exactly as it is the moment before you wake your lurid, leering eyes. --because I would like to point out that the stability of a sidewalks, buildings, roads, signs, fuel pumps, wooden beams, turn signals, sweeping overpasses, rail lines, notes screamed, front doors, porches, horns, shoes - left and right, light bulbs, the pages of a book, linoleum, smiles, etc. is completely incredible.

now, it is dark; the sun gone. I will soon have a word to describe the naked setting of said beast. always do I marvel at the stark truisms that burn solid and immobile in skies that have no clouds. one day concrete will set around the ideas that, for now, seem to float just out of reach, just beyond touch.

the horizon is always the last place that we look when we watch a day end. it loses light last and remains a steady, plodding place that we can nail hope to.

darkness is a safety, a reason. as I look from my window trying desperately to come up with enough good words to fill this post, I see the deep blue of a child’s tethered eyes and the reflected, blood red of my walls as lit by a lamp and reflected in a dark pane of glass. I sit - mirrored between the two colors like the midpoint on some spectrum that has two ends. my head is the point at which we all move away from. --cryptic, wailing notes are working their way out my body and into the world. duck, blind yourself, jump from the nearest moving car - whatever it takes to avoid my fervent hammerings.

when I make eye contact there is the mild bluck of a thud in my brain, think darts worming into a board. think boots being set into thinning winter mud. all those who look share only the fact that they’ve looked. movement and stillness are my only two speeds. I’m worried not about me and the caricature I can become.

surging harder, with intensity reserved for animals and saints.
winding my way up and down a road labeled good day.
you ask me to think out loud and
so I do.

telling you about me cannot replace me.

Nov. 14th 2008

the words which sit inside men aren’t [always] able to bleed themselves out…

…but do let me try.

a sky with the purity of porcelain greets me as I move to waking this morning. through my ancient fogged, windows I can see the sun - weak but bright - painting the western faces of all the children who employ themselves as dancers beneath it. please do welcome this friday with a momentary smile and a moment of mild, unwashed tenderness for those you love. --I can hear the city starting to hum - a washing machine heard through two walls. this day, this day I am a supersonic hero plumping depths, measuring heights -- sailing along boulevards and rattling my way down the tucked endless edges of sallow fields imploring this earth for any clues that will let me poke tender holes in a membrane reality.

Nov. 12th 2008

for the moment, people here love the idea of Alaska -- people here in their tall shoes and clean jeans cannot wait to shrill their opinions on my home out into the four way stop street evening. their words carrying only until another car moves by vacuuming them right up. of course those who talk the loudest of such a holy place have never been there. experiences tends to silence criticisms. pundits make racket while those breathing life go about their work using said breath to breath.

Alaska houses some of the last quiet places in the world. I’ve heard them.

I don’t want to stand outside in the red stoplight city night and argue without interest or conviction the half-assed attempts of a government bigger than anything imaginable. I don’t care about sarah palin. she doesn’t matter. she is not Alaska. she is embarrassing yes, about as Alaskan as ted stevens. they are people who have brought a beautiful state into a spotlight that beams down misunderstanding. they are the new figureheads of place that gets mostly, for better or worse, left alone. the calendar says that it’s 2008 and the airwaves tell me that you can’t just hide - pink floyd head-in-the-sand-style - from it it all. I don’t suggest it, but in Alaska, I know it's done. I know it is done for a reason.

I’ve stood face to face with that reason. not up there, but down here. the sameness that we’ve built into our grid cities and timed lives can only be escaped completely. --the barber and his customer talk of how everything looks the same when you drive to Alaska. the same! I’d argue the opposite, that everything we’ve plopped down everywhere else is the same. another restaurant, another road, another hotel, another house, another street sign, another fat man, another motor, another series of evolutions in the great machine of this earth that has allowed us to all but forget where this good land once was and what this good land once asked of us. WHEN WAS THE LAST FUCKING TIME THAT YOU THOUGHT ABOUT WHAT CAME BEFORE OUR THOUSAND DAILY STIMULATIONS?

the mildly drunk faces that I look through when they start up talking are only going with what national news has given them. if we had been standing together in may, they couldn’t have told me who our senator was, who our governor was. as it stands, information - dull, biased and repetitive - has been flushed through our mental interstates and now clogs all the exits. they want to talk at me. they want to see me as a big red representation of all that they’ve been told. I acquiesce, willingly playing along with their three or four scripted paragraphs. --my if they only knew that they all say the same things!

I cannot take them for a trip into my head. they cannot spin my rolodex of memories and views and ideologies and natural buzzing. this is a good thing. it has taken me my whole life of listening and observation to exit that place with any semblance of who I am. the trick in talking to people about Alaska is to hope that they see what it is, not in what you say come friday night in a loud, dark, way-too-hip place, but through each action, blink and repose that you commit with your entire being.

charm - a word for young women and old, safe men , flirts to the edges of my lips. I’ve been taken by a place -- not by what it offers but by what it keeps at bay: people. hardly does the earth need more of them snooping around on her, muddying her up with their diseased steps - frightful and dangerous as anything. give this vast little planet just one place where it can breath without a thousand men rushing up to gather the beauty it exhales.

you may leave it, but Alaska does not leave you.

Nov. 11th 2008

with the dining room windows all fogged from my cup upon cup upon cup of tea, I am captain of a groggy, nearly sightless vessel. --welcome to breakfast. welcome to my website. welcome to the bits and parts of my life that seem of the sort that can be placed safely out over the wires. so much of the time these great string are high and taut - God’s own building standards. let us then race beneath them sending only our voices up out and above their slinking, tangled selves.