Earnesty

So, I look up at the blue sky and hold up my hands. I'm calmer now. I carry more now. After two years of sleep, I feel like I'm waking. It's not so cold, and actual sleep is still hard but not terrible. I'm getting some fiber and exercise. Scurvy should be put off by the apple I ate. Rodrigo & Gabriela play Stairway to Heaven in my gifted iPod Shuffle. It somehow fits my mood.

I can barely remember the bus. Somewhere between Philadelphia and South Bend a kid sold me like some random amount of broken .5mg alprazolam pills. Some ununiformed police asked me how much I'd been drinking. I took offense. That much I remember. I asked him why he would ask me that and he said, "You're slurring your words." I think we left it alone. A nice lady pacified me. I can remember her face and form. I can't remember if she was from Chile or from Russia. I probably tried to speak the wrong language, and I can't speak the languages properly anyway. Just Giosuesan.

I watched the river run away from me, carrying foam and leaves, fishes and forms all fast away, like time and life and pain. Let it go, I felt. I just subdued a cataclysm of emotion to write that experience. I can't tell you how tender it is. I think about things like trees reaching for the sun, things to remind me that so long as my core is sound, I can still go. And I'm not in such bad shape. My mind is a bad neighborhood though, and the gimmick of the turn of phrase is terribly true. I should stay out of it alone. I sat and told some woman to do the Next Right Thing. She was worried about money. I told her that money gone is money gone, and that it's not to be concerned about.

She told me she had never cut grass. I've tried to push a man-machine mower through a trailer lot. It wasn't well oiled. I was small, but man I tried. I could get her so far and then thump, she locked up. It's like trying to escape an ocean to give up. If you stop fighting it, stop fearing it, but respect it, she will put you to shore; or not, but what's the difference? Life.

I've been telling myself and others that when I make plans g-d laughs and I'm sure it's been amusing enough. I'm going to the art museum to find some victory. This morning I've been playing Rocky.

A-la. I'm wide awake, it's morning.

Indiana State Signal 41

"Is [there a] lie detector available" There are three sides to a story, I've heard and I believe it. I see it. I love the phrase, "Ask me no more questions, tell me no more lies." I don't like to lie; don't ask me questions. Stare into the blackness or just at the window. The less interested you are in a lie the easier it is. I think sometimes I parody myself lying. That's at my better, then it isn't meant as a prestidigitation.

NYC lies like some sort of matrice in my memory, channels of skyscrapers north and south, east and west. I'm not at home there anymore. I am at home in the speakers with Jimi Hendrix coming from them. That's an old memory too. So lies? Sew seed.

حب

Lamed is the giraffe. I had to ask like nine times. The context was there. The word was Shalom, and that was written in every language. Peace. My hairs are at attention, pilating and that. I'm working on too many projects, the Kryptos sculpture, Hebrew, some book about US media, ugh. I need a break from -nothing-.

Oww.

Well, I find myself sleeping through some less nightmares and with better sinuses. My guts are twisting, but it doesn't hurt. I'm ok. The challenges I meet with others and the forces at hand aren't so overwhelming. I'm cool with it. My body is free of Phy. I know this. In some matter of days I will be ready to take some bites of this life. "Ever since I was a kid I've been a voodoo basket case."

Now, I am given to choosing my way. I'm unsure, but I guess I don't have to know right now. When I need to know I will. Anyway, I'm on like a 15 day hold, minimum. It will be mid-October before I see the next town, the next faces, the next era. Parts of me want to go digging around in the past, but a bigger thing tells me not to. Just move on. Move on.

Music keeps me alive and sane. If I listen though, I can't sleep naturally. I'm comfortable with two sheets and nothing more, but I have my own blanket if I need it. Last night I dreamt I was in an army and on a bus I shouldn't have been on. I was firing .22 rounds at things on the bus, and then some big old soldier. I killed him. The gun I hid under my right thigh. They wanted me to move from my seat, which I did not want to do. That would have been bad. Soon enough I woke up and untangled myself from this dream.

Yawn.

Heart of Darkness

The man was sitting there when I stopped. I looked around and there was a whole other picnic table bolted to the ground there on that intersection in Manhattan. He seemed a part of the scenery, backdrop, not much to concern myself with. He was a large but dismissible silhouette. I sat there and stared. The dark shape grumbled, coughed and turned shining black eyes to me. "Hello," I acknowledged. "Mmm." I received.

I lit a cigarette. The shape became a man and he asked me for one. I gave him one. He asked me for a lighter. I handed him the lighter. Soon, we were in some conversation. He probed with dialectics and then we got into some ramble. There wasn't much to talk about so we did some strange staring contest. I asked him when it would end. He rumbled and laughed. I asked him if he'd seen Apocalypse Now, as an ice-breaker, you know. More mumbles.

I asked him if he'd read "Heart of Darkness" and he claimed he had. Then he did some performance piece of that title. I think he thought I was a white kid being racist. For all I know he was a Vietnam man. More staring contest. It was a loose end I was trying to tie up for myself. I had been in the room but was much more distracted by horniness than I could to pay attention to the stupid movie. I think that I made out with that girl to Apocalypse Now. Bad magic.

He handed me the last inch and a half of dilute 40oz. I felt obliged, so I mimed a swig. Even that disgusted me. Soon, young blacks passed and he came to life. The white kid in the dark corner was nothing interesting. Maybe they had something more interesting than the nothing Mephisto and I were playing about with. He wasn't helpful in resolving my loose ends there. It was a strange occasion though, where a man with nothing had the time to show me the dark blackness of his pupils, stained with the second half of the twentieth century.

I think now, that I was looking for a movie in those black screens as if I stared I could see some echoreflection of the past, and thereby see some vaticination. Even if he held out to me a clear black orb of obsidian, I don't believe I would have been any clearer. What broke this strange game and the laughter and way he sprang to life when the young men passed by voided it in some ways, but I never did forget the strange night.

How to Get Out of Gaol by Writing

The last time I really wrote I was in prison in England. I can't deal with these slimy keyboards. They feel like sticking your hands into a vat of muck and wiggling your fingers around. No matter what I do, my hands come up slimy. Johnson, the Welsh screw, always looked like an older, taller, more sane me. He would open the door, look, close it and lock and my stride wouldn't break. My mind was free. My body was stuck in that damned cell.

I knew that the wall to the prison was within jumping distance from my window. Well, that's what I saw anyway. The bars, though, presented their own problem. The way I remember them is like old fashioned steel bars, but they must have been retrofitted. HMP Brixton was an old gaol, in South London, and famous to me. The days stretched on, mostly in search of one comfort or another, a cigarette or cup of tea, the occasional cup of powdered coffee and books. Of course, writing kills time and days.

The US State Department came to visit me. That was fun. I was probably very poor in condition, but it was someone familiar to talk to. The only other Americanlike person was a Russian. Somehow he had his own cell, complete with binders and boxes of papers. He explained to me that he was being held because he had been raising metal from the sea bed between the first Gulf War and September of 2001. Everything someone says about why they were in there had something off about it. There's too much to go through, and I didn't ask questions because I wasn't so interested.

When you're locked in a room, you begin to look at getting out of that room. Not just, for example, to go get your food and return the room, but to get out of the building, complex, and her governors. In prison, or remand at least, my main interest was my defense. So this was naturally a good thing to write about and I did. My defense was: Let my punishment match my crime, and I do plead guilty, conditionally, though my prosecutors would whisper down the lane the facts as they have been sensationalised by the police. I was pretty fair about it all. The judge actually looked at me and said, "I've read your statement, and it seems you have some degree of education, and I don't think that you are a threat to society. Still though, the nature of your crime and the gravity of it is such that I have to pass a custodial sentence. He paused. 9 months." I had to stay in those cells for 4.5 of the months. They let me out early because of a weekend I think. I had already been incarcerated for more than three.

Non

I will not be a captain of industry. My stepfather reduced man's end to reproduce. That, too, I believe I'm rejecting. I don't believe it made him happy. That, this is my work. How, then, do I go about it? Every time a puzzle is solved, each time I see something better and more completely, when I feel something new as a man, my brain gives me a little satisfaction. Still, though, I reel from it back to some stasis afterwards. Rare is the night I go to bed with a smile with something true. Whatever my work is, it is not just this. Words and ideas can be filed and documented, an index card made for each one, neatly stacked and slotted but this will not be the end, this is not whole satisfaction.

To breathe life into that system, in a sense, does give a fountain of that satisfaction. Some fountainlike youth. A regeneration each time it is used, the protocol is followed. Am I a bureaucrat? Only on my constructive days. The rest are tempted with a streak to test the limits, to stretch, strain, and reach for the better. Without this mean streak, I'm not sure the work could be done as well. Will you find me twitching and spitting on the fluorescent cement floor of some cold library? I can't tell you. I'm just a man, nothing more. What will you expect?

When I am allowed around great arrays of books, long shelves of numbers and all the ink spun and slung I begin to click and whirr. Never have I let myself collapse in the library. There's too much; I can't sleep. The last time I was not careful I found trouble that way. It would be safer to stay in the library I know, but I begin to lose the forest for the trees and therein lay the folletti and other metaphoric creatures of legend. Also in the darkness deep and steeped in restless searching is a magic and an inspiration. I can live with some limitation, but to close certain doors I am unwilling. Perhaps among my weaknesses this could represent me. That, and my intolerance for ticks and bedbugs. I'm now neither safe in the country nor the city; where faute de mieux.

I've lost myself

Where am I? In the park, I went round it. The perimeter was not so big, and the tour was taken counterclockwise from above. There was a statue where the graffiti whispered about it. "Lies" it breathed. There was a phenomenal achievement of graffiti on a Philadelphia Electric Company building sort of pier. "Hot Boo," it read. Such a perfect spot and that is what to write? Maybe an arrow of love shot at a girl, or some story I don't know.

The presumptions make me nauseous, and often enough they're mine own presumptions. When asked a question and I look for the answer lately I've been being made mockery of. I'm not offended; it really is a flattery. At least they're listening. The past two days I've chattered and sang to myself nonstop, to keep the internal dialogue at bay. She still creeps in, the wheels still creak but I am trying to get it all out. I've been on some strange diet of almond granola, bananas, and nonfat yoghurt. Restlessly, my girl asked me if I was on drugs in less words.

I asked her which drugs she would think I were on. I'm not on any, but she suggested narcotics. No, I'm very electrically charged, boceta. Voltaire's Penn Treaty Park set the scene, with redundance and potholes of credibility. It was a perfect day.

Semen and Tears

When we met, I had no money. She approached me in the high school cafeteria where I sat in the windowsill by myself, minding my business, thinking greater thoughts than what conversations were being had over tater tots. She had long, beautiful hair and warm and curious eyes. Beautiful eyes, she had. I wanted to keep them forever, fixed on me so that I could see her perfect eyes with lids that cover the just the top of her iris.

I told her I sat there because I didn't really want to be around anyone. I didn't. Life wasn't easy for me, and I was young to deal with it. She had heard that I was a kid that had run away from home, like actually run away from home and not come back. She ended up being valedictorian, I ended up dropping out, but we had some sort of magical bond that was bigger than can be described. I do feel, though, looking back on it that I poisoned that bond and my antics did break it.

Well, obviously I was back, held back a grade, and had spent my young journey through roadtrips to Louisiana and Athens, GA, college dorms and University libraries. I stole clean socks and underwear, sometimes shirts and that from the laundry rooms in the apartment buildings. I learned along the way that sometimes girls do want you to kiss them and touch them, that alcohol was a nihilist pote, and that one can survive with next to nothing so long as one has faith in g-d and oneself.

We were young lovers. We watched Caligula together late at night in her lovely home and made out on her sofa. I would reach down her pants and feel her soft wetness. She wasn't embarrassed. For a long time, she wouldn't fuck me. She sucked me off and I drank her in. We fell asleep naked and satisfied on her sofa and her mother came out in the middle of the night, woke her up and protected us from her father. What a sight it must have been for her mother. Two naked perfect bodies entwined, sharing breath, clothing scattered between the television and the sofa. I wasn't sure whether to be scared or amused.

School ended for her, and she went to Providence to go to Brown. I flung myself at NYC, stayed with a friend at his family's for a couple of weeks and then my welcome was expired. I slept on subways, on rooftops, in boiler rooms because it was cold. My resolve was tested and so was my faith. Soon, though, it was provided that I had the job and money to rent a room. I had become a part of the living, vibrating machine that is New York. From my little room in Harlem on 135th street, I worked connections and countless faxes for a job. I didn't know how to lie right yet when it came to being a candidate for a job. I was stealing internet access from an account I found logged in at CUNY, up above St. Nicholas park. I did have a phone, and that was my only bill. I lived on 200.00 a week.

While she first went to Brown I was in her heart. I made a point to visit and remind her that our bodies and breaths fit so well together. Mary's mom gave me valium because I was nervous to be a fish in such a foreign pond, but I took most of that on the train. I made a mess of that visit. After fighting my way into a job in Norwalk, CT, an old conspirator called me at work to tell me that we would start a company. "That's great. How do we go about it?" He had a client lined up and all we needed were all the legalities of a business entity. Erik's mother was very helpful, and wielded the reputation of one of the most prestigious lawfirms. Our contracts would bore even Victor Hugo.

Suddenly, I began to make a lot of money. I had thousands of dollars. It just kept coming. I worked, I billed, they paid, and an accountant handled the IRS. Oh, now I just had to fuck her properly. The arrangements were made and I came up. We went to one of the finer restaurants and I ordered ostrich carpaccio. Her cheeks were flushed with the bit of wine she had. I ordered a 30 dollar snifter of JW Blue. This seemed to amuse her. She had always known me as poor. She saw something in me that she liked, but I did not have the money or status her family would expect. We went back to her house.

I remember vividly her laying on her bed, her skin a toned white with lovely red flushing and perfect breasts. She just laid there while I stared at her, hard, my breath still smelling of whiskey. I slid up her body and into her. She made a womans perfect cry of pleasure. She was really hot for me. "Come inside me. I want you to come inside me." For a girl who usually used to have me pull out and come on her chest, this was the most sexually laden plea I have ever heard. She said the words like she was in pain, like she needed me to relieve her.

Her breasts were pink, her cheeks were flushed, and I felt her come. Still, I could not release myself. Believe me, if there would be anything I could do to fill her with my semen I would, but, as she had described me, I was a stately lover. Even if I fucked her like I was going to break her, I would be distracted by the phoniness of it. Oh she was real about it all, it was just me that couldn't. The more I became aware of it the more impossible it became. All that ostrich and Johnny Walker Blue got me nothing more than a woman to finally give me what I wanted, only so that I couldn't take it.

I did love that girl, and had for a long spell. For a time after, she was the forefront of my sexual appetite. I thought of cab rides where I put my hand up her dress to find the softest, soaking flesh and she flashed me a grin, "I told you to watch out." We had our good times but she wanted other ones. She told me she was a virgin. I never believed her, but why would she lie?

She did show me love, and I could see the pain in her eyes, hear it in her voice as she had to part ways with me as I grew sicker in this world. Some of it was rough, the words and the actions, but I think I always knew that she did care. When she sucked me off, she swallowed my semen and in so made a communion with me. I sat on a bench with her at Rehoboth beach, following her by hitchhiking, not sleeping, and all to spend some time with her. There were fireflies and butterflies and a magic of youth that I refuse to wash away as foolishness. As I sat near her, afraid to kiss her, afraid to touch her hand, I showed my heart to her and the lengths I would go to to be with her.

At some point, she decided, and with fair reason, that she would fuck some other young man using a lie to get rid of me from the house she was taking care of. I'm not sure that the young man had much of her heart, but it was an act of finality. I got the point. She either had some oats to sew or just wanted me to go. I was sick. It made sense. Poppies had robbed me of my soul, my love, and all the blessings my faith had bestowed upon me. She deserved better, and the Universe gave generously to her.

The Universe handled me in another way. I had to go through miles and miles, cross oceans and borders and back to arrive not 30 miles from the garden of my youth. When we were younger, when she was in Spain, she wrote me a few letters. She was lonely. I was overwhelmed with emotion and tears fell on my page. So in love, I had adopted feminine dramatics. I wished more than anything that I could be there with her. I prayed that somehow I would be, that her soul be comforted, and that she laugh and smile. Many years later I made it to Spain. She had long since returned to the United States.

I broke a child's aluminum and plastic reclining patio chair while standing on it thinking it would hold my weight. Her friends ferociously incriminated me and it was a grave transgression. If I could find a place to buy another I would, but the way they treated me, and that she defended nothing but the chair left me to realize that it was me in this world with its absurdity. The morning after she lied to clear me out so she could sleep with some boy she called demanding to have it be replaced. I had a girl in my bed and told her on the phone to go fuck herself, I had company.

When I was in Barcelona I went to a bullfight. It was a sick affair, a brutal celebration of death, and a comedy of the pain of a beast. Sometimes I feel like that lesser beast and the celebration of pain and humiliation by spectators is no less sick of an affair. Flambouyance and viciousness. It makes my mind see women and men laughing at awkwardness and social falls. What might they say if they were able to feel welcome?

What might I say to her if I were able to feel welcome. I brought her miso soup when she was sick and shot two bags of dope in her bathroom. She pounded on the door demanding to know why it was locked. "Privacy," I answered. We sat on a familiar sofa and looked out at the city. Time had changed, and so had we. The last I remember seeing her was that day. Her father and family have political interests and I'm a volatile character. Still, to this day, I love those times with her.

Dreams

I am awake. The sun isn't up yet. I had fitful sleep, and vivid dreams. I dreamt of sleeping with an ex-girlfriend Emily, I dreamt of snakes eating things too large for them to eat. I dreamt of strangers looking to burglarize what I had already burgled. I can't remember them all but they all woke me up. Each time I went out to see if there was something beautiful on cable and there wasn't. I returned to bed as boats went up the mekong delta in search of Pol Pot's boys. For some reason I'm not afraid of anything. Nothing that I know of scares me. Not getting shot, not cancer, not lupus, none of that. Death is a joke. It always has been. I'd be a good soldier except I can't kill for something I don't believe.

Someday I love to think that I will have a child to teach all the things I've learned about this world, but I can't see that child's mother. I survived childhood, and if I can do it surely a child of mine can. American broadcast journalism nauseates me, and BBC is only on a few times a day. This is one of those times. Coffee, cigarette, BBC. All that's missing is a woman who understands me.

I can't drink, because I can't drink well. Sometimes I take clonazepam for my nerves and motor tics, and I'm given a half a day of relief. When it was prescribed to me, I took more than prescribed so my girlfriend made me call my doctor and tell him I was abusing them. I wanted her to be happy so I did. I also had to call the pharmacy. All of it very embarrassing. I don't want a lover that gives me ultimatums to embarrass myself, but a woman who knows that I can find a solution.

I don't want to go to Uganda. I don't want to see much of Africa. Morocco and Algeria, Tunisia and Egypt are magical and lovely lands, but I don't have any compulsion in my heart to go to those places. I promised myself I'd go to Argentina. I've told people about my dream. It is real. It came from my heart, and I want to get there by motorcycle. Not rushing, slowly and taking my time. I expect to encounter challenges, but that's the stuff life is made of. If it were easy, every trust fund hippie would be doing it. It's not like going to burning man, it's like being Hemmingway on a motorcycle. I'm 31 and soon I will be too old to get away with such dangerous enterprises. Then I will have to have children and give up my sleep to allow my woman some peace.

This is my dream. I want to see what America ignores at best, and meddles with at worst. People are people. There may be ones that hate me, there certainly are those here. Gary Robinson decided when I was 14 and had run away from home to the University that he would call the police and tell them where I was. He told a few of his friends and they would be spectators. The problem was that I wasn't there. Didn't come there that day and wasn't around. I did learn about this and I challenged him to a duel. I punched him in the face and he punched me in mine and we left it at that. A year or two later I read in the paper he was shot in the head while robbing a kid of his LSD and money. His co-robber had pistol whipped the victim and acidentally fired a round into Gary's head. I think from that I learned that people who do wrong dig their own graves. My dream is one of childish wonder and innocence and for all the wrong I've done it can me amended.

People will have their opinions, people will tell me I'll die. People will say a lot of things, but no one will ride with me. A friend, a true friend of mine, would ride with me, not try to stop me.