.echoes.

a million words flutter about my head like confused butterflies in a summery haze

4.27.2004

this hallway smells dimly of an intangible childhood memory
(one of those times when i was eight
and wandering this hallway barefoot and silent
pausing in the spots where the sunlight
warmed the tile)
but its too full of oddities that shouldn't be there
to recreate the ambiance of an eight-year-old-afternoon
and i'm too dusty with vice to be pure again.
so i suppose that's why it only takes shape of a memory;
nothing more than shadows and scents
to remind me of the beauty of some sort of innocence.

but the warmth of the tile
is like sand between my toes,
shifting like soft accusations beneath my weight.
and the grains of evidence
nestled within the threads of my favorite sweater
are longing for the burrs that were picked gently from my hair
and remembering the times they felt the friction
of red carpet and couch cusions
and soaked up the heat beading salty on my skin.

the roughness between those tiles
is the unintentional weight pojected by that presence
awkwardly intimidating and blonde.
thin and compressed by an isolated energy on guard
and yellow skin that hangs and clings to the bones its draped over
dragging the weight of unspoken reason
and newly intoxicated, alcoholic secrecy behind it
everywhere it goes.
but its thin, unlike me,
and held pieces that i can only touch second hand.

or the way the air was when i would walk in the door
bidding goodnight to the headlights
that stole my heart in a beam through the glass,
passing months at a time to wait for that lost sexual tension
to return to my veins again through words, friendly and unsure.
it never filtered out, and still returns to that ottoman sometimes
in the evenings over summers, or follows me down lake shore drive
some saturday afternoons. its sometimes floating in the water
at lake bluff beach when the moon takes the liberty
of stripping to skin, laughter, and chills.
it was always there, even after november took its hold on me.

i chew on genuine hearts when i have them in my teeth,
its an odd oral fixation
letting words escape that i can't discern the meaning to.
but i'm too selfish to be real, or be realized
and its too warm of a sunbeam to walk away from
though it would burn out
if it were to realize that the sky was nothing but empty.
i like that warmth too much though
creating substance for it to rest on, and at the same time
fearing the way i sink to let it fit
just right
and never want to leave.

its why i fill myself with this sweetly salted dissatisfaction
consuming everything unnecessary in my path
in hopes that it might weigh down the confessions
that take to floating when i'm drunk or sleeping or alone
so that eight-year-old conscience of mine
might never find it
because its buried under too much sobriety
and guarded by too much inhibition to discover
and dig up, but too impulsive to be stopped
before i can bury and drown it again
(but i'm still feeling empty and unsatisfied).
so i'll continue until its covered and shows no traces
of unconcealable wandering to a painful exposure.

forgive me, but i guess its better that way...

4.20.2004

i always wanted to be the one worth leaving
__falling apart.
(all these
pieces littering the april floor)

your genuinity is
peeling away strips,
stripping away layers of me,
that i am layering from the inside out.

just to the outside of the inside of you
and you make me smile so
i think i'll keep you.

4.18.2004

i felt it long before i stepped outside,
the truth in this gaze frightens me deeply
and i am lost beyond words.
if i could, i would strip you of your inhibitions
and bathe you in words,
stringing you up in letters
that create a stream of consciousness
dripping honesty that i should never let you taste.
it is the impulse
and the momentary proximity
that rips the inhibition from my body.
i too tremble beneath the weight
that the room carries in a chill
like that single magnolia petal trapped between
the wind and the inside of the world
wishing hard to find release
and float a forever away
in the daze that is a summer evening.

detatch and let drift.

4.11.2004

sitting alone in a resusable silence
seems wasteful
after all the time i spent
discovering the vixen behind these common walls.
it was three days since i read a voice
humming low in tones of muted romance
from so far off,
i could barely reach the memories
attached to my cerebral fingertips
(but they wring my heart of home).

sitting silent in a recyclical stillness
seems like the only reality appropriate
for ressurecting all the times i left fragments
of my heart in the weeds on the sand
soaked in a mist of salty moonrise
absorbing the murmers of a foreign wind
in my ear
feeling no loss for home.

we molt when we are removed.
but i wont tell you how i know
that experience is the only secret
worth holding when it never hurts.

falling through an unusual freshness,
grey spring concrete never felt so good against my back,
bathing in a fiftydegree sunshine.
this poetry has reduced me to confession
rinsing the sand off a sun-spotted conscience.
in the ebb and flow of my heart,
i have sunk beneath the surface of the rising tide,
no longer waiting for words to flow to my fingers
but lay pinned beneath the purge
still wanting to hold on
to the bittersweet taste of the weathered salt
in the back of my throat.

'la vida es como la espuma, por eso hay que darse como el mar'

4.01.2004

estoy contento a verte otra vez
its an interesting pseudo-reality. nothing is real here. maybe it was something in the carribean breeze intoxicating you with every breath, stealing inhibitions in an exhale, leaving you lost floating face down in a sandy, chilean twilight dream. it all seems like it might have started with that colorful liquid infidelity that hits you hard and carries you so high, you lose all concept of the pain of consequence until the guilt sets in and swallows you whole with the tide, but it can't and it won't because it swallowed any last traces of your conscience within. and you haven't a clue where it all begun. all you feel when you wake up the next morning are the traces fo drunkenness you left on the ground somewhere the night before, and you're back at it again, freshly intoxicated for the day with the new carribean gusts that sweep through your whole being blowing out the remnants of a morning after tequila headache and all the memories you don't want to keep when its over. impulsiveness blooms like a flower and grows like a weed comsuming the roots of your normal character while the sun bleaches out fragments of reality that you forget you must eventually return to; or maybe it has something to do with the sand and the salt, and a gluttony that you can't grasp, much less realize in the heat of the moment. when you finally return to the reality that you previoulsy knew, you awake in a blink and it all becomes nothing but a blurry haze swept away in sleep, barely even alive in memory. it is but a weak heart of its own creation pumping just enough to stay alive in a photograph, the sole evidence remaining to convince you it wasn't just a dream.
its a numb tequila erotica that dulls the senses as your lips twist a euphorian smile.