I’m alive when I dream. Tell me when I can go home.

I can’t think my thoughts when Vista damns creativity with 11 point Calibri, day over night over double spaced monotony.

In journalism, paragraphs are key. The holy grail of journalistic success, all you need are paragraphs. One or two sentences to express a statement of fact. Kyle Leerie, 23, died when his car crashed into a tree. He was pronounced dead at the scene. Not, the tree was Oak and Kyle’s accident woke up a family of blue jays. They flew away on impact.

For some reason, I had myself convinced that blue jay was one word. Last night, when I dreamed, it was like a premiere screening of my subconscious. I see the previews every waking hour. When I am alive in the day I fear snakes and dirty shoes and food poisoning. I fear these things in the back of my mind. I think Man the Staples guy is cute. But I don’t say cute out loud, I barely let my thoughts think it. Instead I think, no he is attractive. He smiles well. Like there is happiness to gum-tooth-grin at once in a while, though maybe it’s only in the Staples on Lancaster Ave and only when he’s around.

At night I have break through bleeding of the mind. My dreams are everything I think about quietly, pushed way into the back row so no one – let alone I – notice and call on them for answers. When I dream, my brain flips around. Back of my mind is the front and the front the back. Now all those fears and quiet thoughts are here. LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME.

I wake up to the incessant beeping of a truck in reverse. I hate that noise. Reminding, reminding the world that the truck is moving backwards, backwards in space and I wish backwards in time for then it would not be outside my window beeping through my pillow and into my head.

contacts.

My life is pixelated, populated by unfathomable faces, persons unknown.
All day I walk around looking at shoes, hanging my head like it’s chained to Hell, avoiding eye contact as if it conducts a new strain of the black plague.
Perhaps wondering, pondering the self-censored cardboard cutouts that frump into and out of my life morning day and night.
Ask me what she looks like, what she wears. I couldn’t say.
Remember her? Him? Them? It?

Vaguely.
The back of my mind works overtime to keep meaning at a distance. Glasses are my brain’s way of saying Don’t Look Now.
I don’t. Without the tinkered lenses everything geometrizes into the basic shapes. Lamp-ish, bed-ish, friend-ish. With glasses, things get complicated.
Pixels, black boxes over faces. Whatever it takes to show you that I’m not the friend to cry to. My shoulders are too low too broad too water-resistant.

### 

The nutgraf clearly coincides with another L word Funk. I’d like to slap some fictional characters around, and then maybe start with my future self. Stupid things clamor to cram my horoscope yet I still run home to fortune cookies at night, not sophisticated enough to chopstick my rice, not desperate to get drunk and dial for extended metaphors i can’t afford.

###

the land before time.

Maybe there were dinosaurs. Probably sea cucumbers and Christmas tree needles. Only in the land before time there is no Christmas. There is no twenty fifth. There is just time. getCurrentTime() >> 997345463746392384684575730475730573785026346590 <time units> have elapsed since “startTime”. Why thank you, ambiguous pendulum for maybe something useful. What I really want to know is: why Not?

pious about denying a man in clouds

Why doesn’t God fall through that fluff he mounted his kingdom on?
he did.

i wasn’t raised on my knees in a church, my nose clasped between Gospels. i know about as much of the Lord’s Prayer as our National Anthem. “Oh say can you see by the daunderly light….” i mumbled until i got curious and Ohhhhh‘d my way through the printed lyrics. ‘daunderly’ finally died with them.

It’s the nature of the universe to grow slowly but meticulously like the Lorenz Butterfly particles follow each other separate but equal, like footprints that never quite overlap.