"I want to be left alone. I want to sit in the grass. I want to ride my horse. I want to lay a woman naked in the grass on the mountainside. I want to think. I want to pray. I want to sleep. I want to look at the stars. I want what I want. I want to get and prepare my own food, with my own hands, and live that way. I want to roll my own. I want to smoke some deer meat and pack it in my saddlebag and go away over the bluff. I want to read books. I want to write books. I'll write books in the woods. Thoreau was right; Jesus was right. It's all wrong and I denounce it and it can all go to hell. I don't believe in this society, but I believe in man, like Mann. So roll your own bones, I say." Kerouac to Ginsberg, summer 1949

Dreaming of Anticipation

Last night I had the most vivid dream. I was walking down a street, one that I knew very well except it was empty. The buildings were vacant, even though they were still well kept and the street was clean, maybe even cleaner than in reality. There were no cars, the people I had once known to walk down that street, you know, one of those laughing apparitions from a timeless memory, they were gone too. It was just me, and I saw the lights still on from the old movie house, as displaced from a sock-hop era America, gleaming in the reflections of the windows of the cafes and book stores. Everything was there, but, everything was gone. Everything that mattered about that street had long since abandoned it. It felt the way an empty stadium feels, like it has no purpose, but there's this constant anticipation about something that will never happen.

The next thing I knew, I was walking instead down the long hallway to my room. The room that I spent most of my days in when I was growing up, not the one I live in now. But it felt like home and at the same time, like I was touring my own past. The walls were painted the way they were when I was 11, except I may have exaggerated the pink color a little. I still remember the name of the shade: Impatient pink. It's so fitting for how I felt about it, constantly anticipating the day the color could change. I liked it when I was 8. Three years changes a person's perspective especially when it's spent surrounded by pink. As I was observing everything, still in its place and still cold as anything because that room hardly wintered well, when placed next to the creepy, unfinished spare room. Sometimes I swore I heard someone knocking on the other side of the door in the middle of the night. I noticed something that wasn't there before, it was another person. A girl, not me, but doing probably exactly what I was doing when I was her age in that room, writing some useless information from a stolen textbook into a journal. But the room then became less welcoming when I saw her, as if it didn't need me to fill its large, cold, gaps, with those high cathedral ceilings and the ominous unused door. So I left. I picked up my cat, and left.

Keep in mind, this cat hates me and because of its mentally unstable, deranged personality, I have a difficult time liking it (the cat's family has a history of mental illness... that was actually confirmed by a vet). But, it seemed really important to take her, so I did. I chose my dad's truck which in reality I can't drive a stick shift and this particular truck is part of the reason. My dad tried to teach me but, he gave up after a long lecture about how I was burning the clutch (it was the first time I had ever even tried). In my dream I remember thinking of this, my heart sort of raced because of the urgency I felt to get out of that house but I knew I couldn't because I couldn't even drive the car. I'd never be able to keep it from stalling every four feet. I'd burn out the clutch. There was too much expectation, too much anticipation, to much noise from the damn cat sitting next to me.

I did it. I drove to the end of the driveway without stalling. I drove to the end of the road. I turned left, this was where I panicked, I remember thinking "shift, shift, you have to fucking shift" and I did. As smooth as ever, I kept that truck running. I looked over to see the cat on its hind legs, staring out the window. I smiled. There was this sense of relief, but still that anticipation. It felt better though, as if I could be going anywhere, but no matter where it was, it was going to be good. I'd be happy, I just had to keep that truck from stalling.

Why did I need that damn cat?

I have this overwhelming need to escape everything from the outside in.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

"And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo. [...]"

~T.S. Eliot~

Tell-Tale.

Emptiness in eyes are first followed by words.
They will tangle, twist and leap above
to curl neatly at the foot of the bed.

Wintered silences stifle
what stranger beats the door.

Most nights it's like not being alive.
Most nights it takes the pillow too long to dry.

It'd be too late to wake the walls enclosing.
Too late for hopeful slander.

They'd ease through the cracks
in the heart that now sleeps
Brave sleep.
Eternal disbelief.
Scrape the callases from feet
...but the scars won't go anywhere.

A soul with a window
carries the draft
with the stench of the void.

Most nights it's like not being alive.
Most nights it takes the pillow too long to dry.

Assembly Line Dying

In the gathering of gases,
omniscient to the world within him
for the soot they shove at her feet
and despair slouched in the street.
To themselves they burn their angered torch's fire.
Cats picketing under the slight haze
above rats galloping in their gifted maze.
Run the length of elevated tombs
and the knowledge of this prison still looms.

Two Lone Standing Figures

Sharp magnetic intrusion
interrupts infertile stance
of solemn drifters weeping
at seas of desolation's initiation.
To a parallel palace of ennui awaits
their calling of unforgiven reveries.
In one, among the raining numbers
signals the horror of the rightful befallen stage.
Next is the nativity of rapture,
the Shiva of our dreams.
Behold their legged besetting beauty
but benign in strides of the hidden
voices, faces of the sky.
One is the sand in the typeface melted stone.
Forged is the future of our impending thought.
Birthed is the unwelcome portraits in our home.

Distress on Unrest

Not more.
I make me make myself.
Shift....drift.
Invincible end of winter
sheds my skinless eyes of fear.
My tears
carry in arms of slabs.
In the spattered whispered massacre
make feel below my shadows concave.
Crave.
Aroused is the anxious withdrawal
I am not your will. I will not fill
your nightmare.
Rage, unaccomplished, compounded, compassion.
My hymn is your utter of nothing
and your spacious willows may keep.
Golden is the underworld of my estrangement
that I am not the fiction, rather creation
of this our alien nation.