person one: lost in waters between those of our parents and those of our previous selves, and translating earth before our opening eyes,

person two: the forests eat themselves and live forever.

The List:

Wood baby ruler

no ink pen

Orange highlighter

dead Ipod

Used black spoon

Caseless sunglasses

Two chopsticks

voice recorder

pack of paper clips

topless pen

Fullish zip drives

one dollar

screws

a nut

and a backpack

smell

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I CANT GET ANYWHERE WITH YOU. YOUR ALWAYS FILLING MY TIME WITH YOUR THOUGHTS AND YOUR WISDOMS. WHERE DO YOU GET IT ALL FROM? WHERE IS YOUR PATIENCE? I MIGHT AS WELL LEAVE ALL MY PENS AND PAPER AT HOME, I CANT GET ANYWHERE WITHOUT YOU INTERRUPTING. I GUESS I NEED TO GET BETTER AT SPELLING ANYWAYS. WHAT DO YOU HAVE TO SAY ANYHOW? WHAT DO YOU WANT? DO YOU EVER STOP WANTING? WOULD YOU JUST GIVE UP ALREADY AND SPEND YOUR TIME BEING UNTAINTED BY WHAT YOU WISH YOU HAD AND NEVER WILL GET OR AT LEAST DONT AND WONT KNOW UNTIL THE TIME YOU DO. COME ON NOW, WHAT WOULD YOUR INNER CHILD DO?

I drink the black water. When I wake up I drink the black water. In the middle of a everlasting day, after staring into the many faces all quadratic in front of me, speaking, and being spoken to, I drink the black water. In the day of the moon I drink it. I drink it at the suns rest. I drink it for power and unrest. I drink the blackened water and wonder if it matters. I drink it and wonder if I know it. I curl up leaning to one side standing with a black hat pulled over my eyebrows and I look out into the cold day. I stand and I drink the black water. The black black water with a gentle vapor arising from the hand circle next to my heart. I drink the black water. I drink the black water.

I wrote you this morning from a thought meandered by snowfall and spruce on a covered late autumn winter path. Then it disappeared in thin air, taunting me with questions and confusion. So I remember the words slightly, and rewrite them in this form. Thinking about that trail and how it’s snowing inside of me. Thinking about friends breathing in other countries, their own paths roam, writing the poems of their futures. Repetitions of things they enjoy and live for and repetitions of things that bother them. Unconsciously they are writing, their own stories and discoveries. Thinking about a prolonged hope that someday we will re-meet I am pulled into a window frame with antique glass and a chipped paint boarder revealing the under beauties of old wood and work. It is there that we will meet some day, tangling stories of places, things that happened to us, things we did for others, people we met and the mechanisms we learned about. The things we missed and the things we didn’t, the ways we danced and the things we sang. As I write, I wonder why my previous painting did not save into the nonperishable void of spilt ink. In that cozy living room we will meet and share a dialogue. We will question about emotions, question about time, and question about growth. We will not diverge into translucent interruptions in efforts to speak of prideful monologues. We will not be two people speaking of self with the occasional act of pseudo comprehension and interests. We are different. We will dance and sing in relevance and joy, fading into the night like the morning snowflakes, snowflakes falling gently through time like a child in its infant cocoon and falling into harmless dreams of post autumn and a wood burning stove.  We will cross paths again and talk about our everlasting Lepidoptera  metamorphosis, this something we have created and feel without knowing.

The boy thought as he walked. He thought about the cold night air moving in from a hibernating winter moving slowly around the globe. Where did all the insects go? All the leaves are blowing in the slight gravity and wind. He thought about the cold night silhouettes looking up at the glowing leaves cascading slowly underneath a street light. The corner was timeless except for his thoughts. Nothing moved except the occasional leaf falling from its once supined in its bed on a branch far away from the trunk. These silhouettes were not an emotional black but instead a glowing collection of lights that each something held collectively huddled together waiting for their own turns. The boy was puzzled in his new awareness and realized it was a magical moment he was experiencing and living. It reminded him of the time he once heard someone say, “everyday your not in the ground is a good day.” He, overcome by prior engagements passed the tree up and left the lights behind him. He continued on his way but only this time it was morning. He stared into the frosted ice fields that migrated slowly on the glass panels on an old fashion automobile. The morning light cast through the gentle ice structures distorting their silhouettes into homogenous works of stained glass taking new shapes and meanings in the boys morning mindfield. He thought about the leaves from the night before and then thought about the seasons first frost. He enjoyed the revelation of silhouettes and then remembered something he had heard a friend once say. “Sometimes I am hibernating while I am awake.” He thought about the balance in chaos and meditation and then he saw something truly immaculate. Just then as he was sitting in the mid-days sun, not a cloud in the sky, shrouded by an arch of naked trees, a summers butterfly fluttered slowly and happily alone through the fresh autumn air. He thought about the silhouettes and the frost, hibernation and insects, and just then he realized he was a friend of that butterfly. The butterfly flew by him and he sat. He thought. And then he breathed. 

She sat in the fluorescently lit dark isle against the back wall where the bookshelves slowly pushed in at an un-noticeable rate. They comforted her from something. She hadn’t been there in several years and didn’t realize it. But this day she returned for reasons unknown and she sat. The morning fluorescent lighting was false but held some kind of temporary refuge. Some refuge in another dimension that no one could have seen because it was within her mind where she sat under florescent lines above her, the exact same as the environment that cupped her gently in that same moment. She looked at all the books at one time and saw them huddled together on shelves and felt safe. The carpet was old, like dried out carpet from a sinking ship from times far gone. Carpet that could tell a million stories if it only had a voice. She liked that and the wisdom silence that it brought. She sat. She was calm and looking. She thought about all those books, the carpet, the light coming from strange slats in the ceiling and the white walls and empty picture frames. Insect speed. She sat thinking about how lost people might have been. Having everything could have made them completely unaware of it all and that lighting comes from the sun, that their hearts were still beating, and that blood was red when it touched air, that deer are tame in the city, that deer are scared in the wild, that snow falls at strange times, that it could rain without clouds, that we don’t need what we think, that if we all just sat down together around all those books something big might happen. The artist walked up to her and spoke. “Where are you going?,” he said. She replied, “I’m afraid I can’t tell you that. I don’t know the answer.” The artist replied, “well, that’s a place isn’t it? Even if you’re not moving from this carpet.” She said, “I guess you are right….the only pain I feel though is that no one would never be able to be right here no matter how hard I tried or you tried. We could never be right here together just like I imagine it. You could never be sitting with me, inside my spaceship sitting on my shoulders looking out the wide tall window.” The artist disappeared and suddenly appeared on the girls other side and said after a long pause, “well take me there.”

I pretend the sounds I hear are blasting all around me into the world as they carry on without mentioning the abnormally loud music all around. Filling the voids with transformed little children, us, as we crouch on our knees and looking at the slice of morning light on the edge of a baby green leaf as we wait for the bus on a cold vapor breath crystal morning. We love snowballs until one hits you in the eye and your neighbors mother comes over to get the story strait because we know one of us is lying because we are scared and grew into a world of freedom and war. Water is not realized to be privilege. And all these privileges go unrecognized for so long. America. 

The invisible sound of electricity as it shines out of a black hole, bathing my fingers from the front so my hand shadows dont confuse me or my writings. This is as real as it gets, red cheeks from some sibling of anger or some relative to anxiety, or simply a friend of an internal rainy day that always turns happy or simply forced to smile. you choose how to live, you choose how to think, produce, and be. I am alive and I believe in God. The only thing more constant than breathing is the love of creation, raw and colorful whether translucent musical photography or drawing through words, sitting naked on my floor and calling it dancing, walking to remind myself of the details in human anatomy or simply painting on paper. I currently am old and new in an old home i grew up in, hyperly healthy in its memories but empty like the home i grew up in and no longer see from the inside. I dont live here anymore, an the memories do not match their reflections in mirrors. Maybe i have no choice to re create it all over, but i am wearing red cheeks and am shaking hands with a person wearing all my clothes and using all my paint brushes. can i handle this? is there time for solving equations? I know there isnt but ill never let it be that easy. I am alive and so are my earth clothes. So i rest, so i cry, so i force smiles onto the top of my math exam even though i failed it, i need some kind of motivation. I am a claimer of the non claimers. im not like them and i know that we will always be alone until the end. But we are always connected as energy strands tangled and lively bright when our physical body’s feel, hear, see, speak, taste and smell. I dont like that chapter i jumped ahead to read, i haven’t finished this one. maybe if i trick myself, or wear a blindfold i will pass it all by with a smile on a bicycle behind your friends on a neatly cloud patterned sky in the only place you could be because your there and you know it, leaving any thoughts relative to death locked up in a safe you forgot the combo for and dont need until your physically, spiritually, and mentally wrinkly, toothless, blind, wise, grey, broken, aged, forgotten, used, frail, white, calm, humble, achieved, and alone waiting for your echo to bounce back off the most beautiful dusk bathed autumn mountain peaks seen for the millionth time feeling like the first. I choose to live, i choose to die and any small form of it. I no longer am socially attractive, i am no longer a beginner of my arts. I will be who i want to be and use the same shoe strings i did when i was a child. Maybe this is what being young really feels like. Being alone and completely free to do whatever I want. If i dreink too much, ill be the one on my face. If i climb a mountain to be at the clouds for dawn, ill be the one who sees. and even though the most constant in life is change, there will always be some people, places, and things that will not changee and you will possibly see that they are the most raw truth of genuine love and it will take a short moment for you to see and explode inside thinking how bitterly amazing it is that your still here. Cherish it all. Nothing in this five sensory world lasts forever. But what you find below betweeng, above and in will last forever. Somehow, with no explaination by science, it will. And that is all we have, its the key, its your value, its your reason, its different for all yet the same, and it will take you your entire life to find. Just keep going.

It was then that he hit. Entering into a flash of black, distortion. he held onto anything he could remember, feeling lost. He was traveling through a feeling he had never felt before. Some strange relative to death. He wondered of existence, walking its abandoned streets in an old town he had never been before. Thinking it would end it continued and he felt everything all at once. Opening half-prayers so he could touch something, anything. Signs told him where he was but he did not like them. Unanswered questions reminded him of his tangles with time and physical body. There he was reborn, but not until a day later. His torn body would heal, but not after a night when his home would be pulled up from around his bed and tossed. Waking up in the middle of a forest running away from something fiction. Perception malfunction. Wondering about how something can go so perfectly for so long and then stop. Instant rebirth. No chance for rebellion. Direct interview between yourself and you about a job called life and how somehow your the only one fore the position, and its all up to you to wake up. again.

I feel the words running away as i run slowly to the restroom in the back. “you dropped this,” a boy says as he hands me a paper bag. This is the first time I couldn’t resist. The rusty rust colored car is back, she parks it in the same place every time. They are true New Mexicans, wearing old high school graduation shirts from a small town called Madrid, a struggling tourist town in an ocean-like desert. The EBT card swipes as I ponder into existence a collection of words from the morning. It is here where I met myself again. Re-create yourself you plastic-baggers, these plants are dry and we are out of water. Why are you throwing yourself away like that? When was the last time you truly laughed, you know the good kind that makes you say, “I never want to leave that feeling, I want to stay here like this forever, I’m never going back.” People come in and out as I finish this writing, I have to go.