december 30. goats are here!

something about everything above the collarbones has not felt right for days. something about lurching all across the eastern seaboard...

the wonderful parts of all that travel were still the things dreamed into my notebook rather than the slightest outwardness: i was all excited to panhandle again in new york city, but my 3-hour layover wound up being, more or less, 3 minutes, in which i barely got from one train to another, and the badger has doubts performance was never made any more (or less) real than a picture i drew of girl and goose in greenwich village.

when i reach a place now, i actually feel how much i fill it up. that is the difference desiring to interact with the world makes. i hope people here do not watch the television very much, or else i will vomit in their shoes. for january there will be a lot of other interns here. that means a lot of shoes (at least twelve!) to fill with vomit, and what if they wear boots, or wellingtons? imagine all the throwing up i'll have to do for that! one must eat quite a lot of food in order to have a dozen bootfuls of vomit in their tummy. and food costs money! this is starting to seem quite costly! please turn off the television! okay, truthfully, they turned it off two or three sentences ago, and i feel much more peaceful and much less nauseous now.

i get to meet the animals tomorrow! i can't wait. i want to sneak out now and climb fences. the only animals i've met so far are human ones, who hardly count. i'm already excited for my february here because then there will be only one person living in this house besides me. i had the very strangest feeling today when i first arrived and the person was showing me around. we were standing in the kitchen, and upon looking at the door of the refrigerator i suddenly said, "wait! i'm going to be living with other people!" it was scary. they are going to molest my body in so many ways. especially my ears. but i'm forgetting vital facts, such as that when somebody here offers me a piece of cake, the only thing i have to say is "CAKE?!" or, alternately, "yes please!" i will not have to wonder after ingredients for two months, and that is wonderful indeed. this house reminds me of the one in minneapolis where the activists all used to live together, four years ago or something.. only this one smells much more like goats. goats! goats are here! and you know who else? bunnies! i didn't know that. there are about twenty bunnies here, who live in the rabbit refuge. i wonder what kind of music they would like best. badger has doubts is looking forward to playing songs for all the animals here. accordion for the cows, kazoo music for the geese and ducks. i forgot to tell you! eeyore joined my band. the kazoo hangs from his neck on a green ribbon.

the sanctuary is in a kind of depressed-looking landscape. maybe it is partially because of the color of winter, but it is more like the feeling you get any season driving in parts of the country where everyone is poor and mean. no, i don't know.. when i first saw the farm: the red barns on a hill against a brightly-clouded sky, it was beautiful, and i felt a real sense of arrival. i feel good too, knowing i have a bed for two months, and a place to read and write, and a pair of warm shoes, adopted from the basement. no one could believe that i came here in a pair of converse, or that i was licking mustard off the side of a knife in lieu of dinner. but i can believe anything!

i'm nervous as hell because i shipped everything i have here in one cardboard box. all my records, my underpants, my quilt, my origami paper, and the new pants i got for christmas. OH, and my laptop. i just threw that in the box too. i must say it felt wonderful in new york with nothing to carry and protect but my accordion, bookbag, and stuffed donkey, but if i lose that box i'm really in the shitter. not to mention everything i've written in the past four months would be gone. nothing can be rewrought. there was something about a rowboat, a hotel burning down at night. i think that's all i'd be able to type again, about that.

the trust required to put irreplaceable possessions in a box like that (yes-cd's and underpants are irreplaceable when you have as little money as i do) and hand it over to foreign hands is, i guess, a lot like the trust it took to write so many honest things for evan. because only clocks will tell what ever happened to those words or to that box. i don't know quite how to trust people as places to put my words--maybe they are just as well off in the fireplace. i don't know. i've certainly been throwing words away into this virtual dumphole for enough years, haven't i, without knowing who might remember a single breath of it, much less knowing what their remembering means or matters..

i knew what it mattered in athens; i knew all and everything that it mattered. those people like the things i write. just who wanted to meet me because of a story about donkeys i wrote on the music tapes' message board, a year ago or something. so do you share as much of yourself with the rest of the world, or the least amount possible? do you give your words to "culture", or only the most hand-picked of welken, 'evanly eyes? do you keep writing those sad, glorious songs, or do you talk in strange voices in single town, often concerning treats: pie, cookies, brownies... pie and cookies and ice cream, and make giggle the girls you used to cause to cry? all i ever imagined for myself was a life or death of reclusion, and now i am changing, and i don't know how to believe anyone could like me, or what to do, with anonymous, blundering thoughts. if only they would seize me in the most direct way, take me by the paws and shake them. shake them right off my wrists. then i could not be held responsible. be held responsible for the paws that don't write books.

in the other room there is a rhythmic clinking, like other people are eating ice cream or knitting socks. these thoughts are comforting. sound of television and voices are not. but all is okay. there are so many spotted pigs to inspire me now.

do you know what is delicious? hot cocoa made with soy nog. YUM. you should make a cup today, or tomorrow, before there is no nog left and you have only your tears to drink.

- - -

december 19. a few things i forgot to mention

my train leaves tomorrow morning. first i am going to new york city, where badger has doubts will play a panhandling performance at approximately 2 o'clock in penn station. these will be all accordion songs, as my singing saw is bound for texas alongside a certain anteater and an uncertain boy. you can suspect to hear all your favorite hits and alligator marches above the lurching of trains.

i'll be in atlanta from the 21st through the 28th, eating cookies. i am also going to athens for a few days and visiting the music tapes! you can imagine how i have been jumping up and down in the bathtub every morning just thinking about this.

in january and february i'm interning at farm sanctuary, where i shall spend my days hugging cows and romping in pastures with piglets! i do not suspect to have email or internet access for these months, but you can write me a letter and send it in an envelope thusly marked:

s. moran
3071 aikens road
watkins glen, new york
14891

- - -

december 17.

None of us have felt good this year:
pus around the eyes

exactly.

i acknowledge the fact that i am not a song or a deer, and that there would be more room under the trees without me. kids, skunks, ghosts: what sadnesses creak through your entrails at 300 mph?

- - -

december 13.

Pretzels? Penn Station? Why, of course! Hundreds. Inside and outside. In order to avoid them, you would have to slither across the floor and conceal yourself under various benches until your connecting train arrived. In fact, I must warn you, for you may be pelted with soft pretzels upon disembarkation. Helmets will be on sale in the conductor's carriage. (You have to ask.)

i will be nourished aggressively for my 2-day train trip from nyc to atlanta. now i just have to find a, um, ride to the train station. i hung up pleading badger signs around here to no avail, even offering home-maimed gingerbread cookies! these kids don't know a good deal when they see it! simply fling my body out of your car and you get.. COOKIES! what could be better than that? jerks.

oh. i can only imagine how the mustard is dispensed...

- - -

december 12.

last night i had a dream that sonic youth played here. flocks of kids were coming down the hill from bennington to see them, and i was in front, carrying a wooden loading palette. the band was at a gas station. while they were talking, i ran forward and held up the palette, which i'd painted a badger on. it said "badger has doubts loves sonic youth." i said i'd made it for them, and that if they jumped on it it'd make their feet feel nice. they didn't say anything. i heard only through rumor that kim and thurston had liked it. then i was in their house, holding a hammer close to my face. i was jumping up and down on the palette. i was jumping with the rhythm of the rain and the hammer. in another room, coco was typing a really precocious email to her friends in which she used the word 'godly' in the subject line.

there was also a house a few doors down from my old one in atlanta that'd been painted blue; it had a greenhouse built onto the front, and the door swung open if you touched the handle with your toes. once inside, anything you did was made into an old black and white movie with other actors and actresses who played the role of you. i guess i was in some movie where if you spun around once your clothes came off and you stood there in laced camisoles and bloomers with ribbons; when you spun again your clothes came back. i was played by a boy.

i also at one point told my sister about a dream i'd had, that i'd never really had.

oh! and at the sonic youth show, people were talking about a pudding-making contest, and my friend's pudding was one of the runners-up! i was eating big pieces of red cake with chocolate frosting while it was being discussed, so i couldn't point out that i knew this pudding celebrity.

yes, i slept a lot last night.

- - -

december 10.

the most intimate relationship i'll ever have will be the one with my words.

or candy canes.

- - -

december 9. beards, bicycles, stars, tongues

i miss kansas.

i miss conor oberst. why can't he come sleep beside me?

i miss.. cherry cider.

this morning i went tobogganing, ate some cereal, and accidentally deleted 8 pages of a paper i've spent no less than the past three days writing.

my response to all these things: "whee!"

- - -

december 8.

thank frith the snow, at least, makes everything slow. it has come in inches. it can almost, almost make this whole place quiet on a saturday night. my body remains in bed. it lies down, watches windows; every ten minutes or so it sits up and types a sentence, or half a sentence, or nothing at all. and stares snowward. i don’t know how many days i have been sitting in this room, writing about the holocaust and paul celan, feeling weepy over every song, poem, and bag of cookies i inhale. there is a wheelchair sitting outside my window. it has balloons on it. and snow...

it takes snow falling outside a window to make a room feel like a real place. the walls have some purpose tonight. my earthling body is inadequate, my body who is not a badger’s. wouldn’t a badger be outside, romping? somewhere off the coast of iowa, there, who is waiting and smelling like a girl and climbing through the beards and closed lips?

lonely days are starting to grow on me. i can’t believe christmas is approaching. yes, this all goes too fast. i wish i had about a hundred more years to be here and be evan’s friend.

he comes to my room sometimes and fills it up just enough.

last night he taught me how to play the march of the alligators (a, e, g, a). i taught him how the sewers of new york city are flooded with their tears, and how to make a saw sing. his hands are so soft and white they remind me of slugs. or lambs.

"it’s wrong to think you should play an instrument just because you’re holding it."
"like it’s wrong to think you should talk just because you have a tongue in your mouth."
"exactly."

the past three occasions i have closed my eyes produced approximately these feelings:
a) i’m being run over with a sled.
b) i’m climbing trees in germany. the boughs are bending and snow-covered.
c) i have just vomited the contents of a can of concentrated orange juice.

bedtime, perhaps.

when i see flowers under a streetlight, i am about to remember something from childhood that i‘ve forgotten forever; i just walk away from it.

- - -

december 7.

at least twice a year, i decide once and for all to stop writing things on the internet. i felt one such twice a few days ago. i forget why. i just know it would be better if i didn’t write here.

i still know, but i am lazy, and lack discipline.

approximate cookie tally for the past two days: 39.

- - -

december 5.

tell me about the real places you know. inside yourself, in other people, in the lost souls of birds. everywhere.

- - -

december 3.

today i nibbled wrists and drew flighted rats. cockapoos dragged me through the forest at top speed.

hlao-roo,
i tried to reenact the dance of the skeletons, as per your instructions. i jumped right, i jumped forward, i ran around the aneurysm/candle in my heart, i flailed my arms, i clucked three and three quarter notes with the tongue and thought about kangaroos. what you regretted to tell me--that the dance must be performed in a state of socklessness--proved to have horrifying consequences the likes of which have never been seen before, not even by the seeing-eye spiders who live in my rotting windowsill. a thousand gods and sainted gerbils died tonight, due to my socks. heroes fell. george reeves stuck a gun in his mouth. poems went mute. stories spilled ink. all those books with their spines broken and their leaves falling! i had to clasp my paws over my eyes when the words died. words in english, words in lapine, the russian laughter of anteaters! i couldn’t see that, not with my eyes or even, evan, those borrowed from f. kafka, whose stories were suicides and mice drowning. his eyes, those eyes that licked postage stamps--how could i let such eyes see such an end? i tried to hide under the covers, but my bedsheets unfolded like a bandage, exposing wound after wound. the sheets remember--all the badgery nights fraught with reluctance. reluctance to live! i am that badger! that is why the skeletons have given their last hair to my bed, to fill its pillows, its mattresses, its donkeys, its quilts. so that in a gown i could be comforted by the sleep such implements bring. so that i could dream--dream of being a deer in an empty hotel. i stand on the stairs, my ears flicking back and forth for some sound, some voice. i am that deer whose spots are still young! whose ears are still lonely! i ring the concierge’s bell with my nose, but no one comes. for sustenance i nibble wallpaper off the walls. at night i stare out the window, hearing the sea but seeing nothing, because the glass is too dark and too smeared with years. they painted it over in 1945, to keep the zeppelins from finding a mark, but i wish they hadn’t. i wish i had died back then. the black paint was dropped down a flight of stairs in an old milk pail, and ink poured out of it. blood too pours eventually out of the cow. i will lie patiently in this corner. someday i will have antlers. someday my soul will scuttle out the window and down a fire escape, on hooves.

we will placate the skeletons with the playing of instruments. we must sing about thirty-seven octaves higher so the raccoons can hear us. they will love us with their old ears--they’ve been crowded for years with the subterranean voices of slugs and skeletons. how beautiful will sound songs propelled from living lungs! they will wake up and crawl out from the beds they’ve built in the pelvises and empty ribcages buried below. they will dance with us! they will claw at accordion keys! they will strum guitar strings!

- - -

december 2.

I had a terror since September, I could tell to none; and so I sing, as the boy does of the burying ground, because I am afraid.

scent of continuity on my hands. it smells suspiciously like carob chips. i’ve been tricked!

tonight evan and i went to a graveyard where some of the graves from three centuries ago have the death’s head outfitted with canary heads and cabbage wings. it was cold. we wandered in skeleton-seeing spectacles. across the road was a horse who jumps the fence in the middle of the night and wanders around licking the dates and names off of graves. it seems like i am talking about the ocean when i write that. maybe i am. maybe the horse is the ocean.

we living ones sat on top of a huge tomb in which lay the bones of one mr. linus eisenfluffer! i could tell by licking the tomb that he was a child molester. evan had a record player with him; inside it was my copy of fevers and mirrors that he’d borrowed yesterday. he turned it up really loud and put the headphones on the tomb so we could both listen. a song coming out of displaced headphones like that seems to be a person, as people are things marked by their possession of a) a location, and b) a voice, the way a boy does in the dark. it was like being alone but not lonely. i lay down with my head close to the song, so that all i saw was sky and star and evan’s feet, which seemed inconsequential. we were listening to "an attempt to tip the scales" and i told him how i used to sing this song from the backs of horses. and for some reason i felt i could sing there too, for our two pairs of depilated ears and hairless rumps.

right now i am lying on my back in bed, submerged under anteaters, and the moon is outside my window. donkeys and armadillos also submerge me.

"what do those taste like?"
"the ocean."
...
"only the ocean is full of carob trees, instead of water."

- - -

december 1. christmas campaign!

i'm having christmas in atlanta for the first time in nine years. atlanta is the only place where christmas ever meant anything: where staring at the decorated tree was better than staring at nickelodeon. where fat men with ponies and hysterectomies were baited down the chimney with little debbie swiss cake rolls. where i heard reindeers' breath in the sound of the heater coming on in the very middle of the night. where i was the last one awake at night. where i was the first one awake in the morning. where biscuits were plentiful! where couches were comfortable! where the day was long, and where that wasn't a bad thing. i want to wake up in the same room, find my stocking by the same fireplace, love the same cats, feel the same way.

you can help! please: write a letter to the people who live in my old house and tell them to let me sleep there for christmas. tell them i am responsible for the crudely drawn buttocks and genitals they've been finding in unexpected places for the past decade. tell them i miss the raccoons in the laundry room and the raquetball hanging from a string in the garage that was my mother's only way of knowing when to stop the car. tell them their children are going to grow up into crazy fuckers for living in a house equipped with a "dumphole" (if they haven't already).

send all correspondence hereward:

gentle inspiration of beavers & blue teeth, inc
415 forest valley rd.
atlanta, georgia 30342

hurrah! thank you.

- - -

november 29.

have you ever made a boy smile with stories of a czechoslovakian snake going to the grocery store for a box of english muffins? have you ever climbed a tree with such a boy, leaving armadillos and anteaters and deceased hats on the branches below?

i have, i have!

let's be friends! i fuck hats!

- - -

november 28.

yesterday, the alphabet magnets on the refrigerator said "LETS B FRINDZ." today they say "I FUCK HATS."

i think we're missing a couple letters..

last night i had a dream about an island where children traveled back and forth in low-flying airplanes. i didn't go for that, preferring instead to ride my bicycle along the beach. at one point i am asked to try to "start" a piano--it has an engine. it's sitting in a garage and the keys are covered with motor oil. the piano is a child's airplane. i couldn't get the engine to turn over.

i think that was inspired by the 5,000 fingers of dr. t!

- - -

november 27.

once upon a time, four years ago, there was a boy on the internet named bradford cox. he had a website of some sort or other, as i suppose we all did in those days, and i suppose i saw it once or twice, because i remember a photo he had there: a polaroid picture of himself with thurston moore, in which he was smiling, holding flowers, and staring at the ground. thurston was neither smiling nor holding flowers nor staring at the ground, but his hair was nevertheless in his eyes. the boy, bradford, looked about 11 years old. i always thought the timid way he was holding those flowers was very beautiful.

i didn’t expect to ever remember that. i was sitting here in the middle of writing about the beavers, and for some reason i began to wonder how many girls my age were living somewhere, in some apartment, in some city or town, with grey cats named thurston and boyfriends named something else; and i bet: a lot. at least twelve.

i think it is unsettling to me being around people my age.. who have and have had friendships, and other kinds of ships, including those ships aboard which people have sexual intercourse. the worst thing is finding out, once i do get in their rooms, that they have the same records i do. i mean.. having somebody ask ME if i’ve ever heard of neutral milk hotel is like.. like..

dlkfhsdafhishdfkldsahflkh!!!

you know?

and getting in their rooms not because i was invited, but because i finally just mustard up the guts to knock on the door and asked to borrow their bed, much to their bewilderment--

here’s to bradford cox, who disappeared. here’s to innocence and stupor. here’s to beavers, pondering the geometry of a lunar eclipse. here’s to the hope that someday i will shake my fur dry of these feelings. here’s to the absolute and wonderful aloneness of sleep and dreams.

- - - -

november 26.

favorite things to do with a deceased toenail:

stab
pick
peel
mince
maul
flay
sculpt
prune
scratch
scritch
sleep
eat carob chips
hack at rotten remains with a pair of toenail clippers

- - -

november 25.

i love to lie in my bed when it's raining. it's all dripness and darkness right now. i want to draw on the walls with carob chips! seven crows, a girl, an elephant.

(after i wrote that i did actually go downstairs, grab a handful of carob chips, and draw on the wall. but not my wall. that would be very expensive! i drew a picture of the moon in the hallway by the backdoor. it's so beautiful! when i have my own house it is going to be completely besmirched in this fashion!)

the sheep are born with antlers in tannu tuva..

cows are silhouetted! foxes are alive!

it should be quiet, but i am cold, and longing to borrow someone else's bed, or burrow in someone else's bed, or be a burro in someone else's bed.

that is what i would like! more than anything!

sometimes I pretend I am a buoy, flouncing about in the Arctic Ocean! no.. no, I don't, but sometimes I pretend I am a boy, or almost a boy, like pinocchio. don't laugh at me.. pinocchio even got to be a donkey for a little while..

this room already feels like a place i used to live insead of a place i am living now.

forgive me, my bones are cracking and collating.

- - -

november 22. my thanksgiving feast!!

pickles, broccoli, and a slice of pie!

um. i spent a lot of time today riding around on my bicycle trying to remember what 'defenestration' meant. got nothing done. i wish i had some crackers.

- - -

november 21.

just sleep. songs will come. they must. the sun has risen without underpants. something is wet in the corner of the room. dogs have lost their ability to navigate by the stars.

jeff mangum will be like a father to you, carrying you when you’re asleep. you will sing from somewhere he too is singing--the corner of a room where we should be asleep, like children in an orphanage. when you wake up, you’ll feel 1,000,000 miles closer to him. similar things have taken place between yourself and franz kafka. you still don’t quite understand. it might take years. songs and words erode you from inside. but there are nights and mornings.. we truly can interact with those people through their creations--we just have to eat about twenty cookies and five donuts before bed and sleep with the windows open.

but i do, i do feel the strangest nearness to him this morning. i want to write him a valentine asking if he had the same dream! asking if he really drove an old pickup truck with wet pillows and a stuffed pig in the back..

and if i really did hug that pig.

it’s thanksgiving recess. everyone is gone. evan is gone. he’s in the air. so i have no one left to write to. i can’t imagine leaving this place for a single day--i have so much to do. so many dams to build. so many donuts to devour. but there are clouds over me; i don’t think i can ever be lonely again. what is happening with this boy.. you might not understand how much that is for me. it’s like someone i loved in a book has come alive, has come here, to this very hill. and not just that. i even feel he’s my friend.

and i recognize that i recognize that feeling, and realize, finally, that i did have friends in minneapolis. they might not’ve been kirks with kites, and they might not’ve had the time or desire on their paws to keep my lonely soul company, but they were good kids. they were kind to animals, they had beautiful stuffed whales and arms, and they made the most delicious blackberry pancakes that side of the mississippi!

it's funny how after knowing you the word "tapeworm" gives me warm fuzzies.

i miss them, too. especially when they mention silk nog.

- - -

november 19.

i wanted to see a pyramid today. one white with an attic and a face, the gazing face of a donkey or a child at its window, dreaming without expectations, dreaming the unpronounceables. to me this is the most beautiful form any creature can take. we are the beginnings and the ends of the world. we don’t have to build crucifixes at our edges. it doesn’t matter how alone we are. it doesn’t matter what we can or cannot see from the floors where we always seem to be lying these days, on occasion, with our arms around the neck of a plastic rocking horse. i have pyramids inside of me. and geodesic domes, built by beavers.

no one will ever read my words, not in this century or in those approaching. does it matter? couldn’t i dredge up a single sharp toothful of the ambition you have to be a capital-a Artist? a capital pee-pee Published Poet? oh, let me lick your young ears! i write only for the forsake of living, for the sake of inward worlds! they need me. not you, not any human on earth, but the white pyramids where moths roost and fly out like thoughts. there is something around them too--a deep pond for the whales and lobsters, a place inside me where all the animals could be safe. maybe it is the ocean of tears, or the estuary of dry-eyed girls with breaking hearts. i want to put all the animals inside me. you couldn’t get your teeth on them then, not you or anyone else. you eat the animals. why do you eat the animals? a bird cannot give his wings to your eyes if you’ve already taken them in pieces for your stomach.

when i came here, i never thought i’d spend my november nights crashing around a dark meadow like a poisoned horse. i never thought there’d be days i couldn’t write a word except for the altogether too wingless eyes of j.p. morgan. i was born for this crashing, this blindness. i could never be one of those ones in a well-lit place, working diligently on something or another. my badger-nature does not allow for such feelings. i dig in the dirt. i smell the prairie. slugs crawl through my heart. of course there is music. there is that soot around the moon, too. the moon is the wrong word. it will always be wrong, but the sky around it will always be inky and seven-syllabled. the spilled ink of all the suicides and right words. words that would make people love animals, or love me. i have no idea what they are. there are two true words in my mouth, and i hate them. i won’t say them. i wish i could hide in ink like an octopus!

evan, tell me that loneliness is someone else’s invention. tell me that i’m right. i was not lonely as a child; now i stand in the hall like it’s the edge of a playground where other people’s hearts are beating, and mine is made with a cookie.

nijinsky is trying to put me to sleep... he smells like florida, then the rain comes.

actually, i can't remember the last time i liked being alive very much.

it's a beautiful morning with carob on my socks, an anteater on my pillow.

one of my teachers recruited me to walk her dogs (the brothers cockapoo), so i get to go play with them now!

- - -

november 18.

dear diary, i think you’ve been replaced. i hope you understand. he’s reeeeally cute!

when i am with other humans, the air i breathe or the food i eat feel like secrets i am putting into myself.

could you show me the reality of your being alive is no different from the reality of your writing? because i don’t believe in other people today. they’re either scheming to steal my teeth or throwing bunches of crummy presents down the chimney. all i ever wanted was a pony and a hysterectomy. do you understand why it makes me sad when you say you possess a heartbeat? anne frank has been dead for fifty years, joseph cornell for thirty, frank stanford for twenty. i don’t need a time machine to love you! what i need is far more impossible to build..

i ran away today. have you been to the mile-around woods ever, evan? i used to dream about your anteater sloshing through the long corridors of leaves. now that his existence has been formally recognized, i find him much more difficult to dream about. i’d like to invite him to a celebration of slumbers in my room. he should bring a toothbrush and a nightgown with scalloped cuffs! would you please convey this invitation to him, whether through well-wrought looks, hand-claps, or wringing of the tail?

a sheepdog greeted me as i entered the woods today.. the lady who was with her said, "she’s dying to say hello to you." those words almost made me cry. because i know exactly what kind of dying "dying to say hello" is. and i’ve been dying in that way (and a few others) for so many years that i think it’s killed some of my organs, namely the stomach. i only have to consider the possibility of knocking on someone’s door for my stomach to start hurting. so you can’t say you know nothing about the intestines of a sheep, at least not now! maybe you could do some further investigations, then display your findings in dickinson: "correlation of nausea and door-knocking in sheep-shaped sack of guts." i think a real poet could pull it off.

the way i act gives me no reason to suspect i should not be lonelier than a lighthouse! but sometimes i want another pair of feet, i do, there beside me, so we could sound like another animal walking through the woods. man is a woefully few-gaited creature. it only sounds like one thing when it walks upright in leaves. i want to sound like a deer or a raccoon! i want to turn away from my human shadow like a frightened bird! and fly through the woods..

birds would still be our greatest acrobats even if this world were completely skyless. i fear someday it might be. i fear losing the sky.

- - -

november 17. story-writing contest!

tell a story about stonewall jackson sleeping in a tree! i want a pony to nibble his bootlaces off in the middle of a dream.

- - -

november 16.

everyone here says i am so innocent; that i am protecting it and my secret world, and my world with the animals. that i will not share.

i am spending my night in bed with eeyore, huidobro, and a carton of soy dream. thank goodness for friends.

this will require ever-enlargening pinknesses, whether folded in half or carried by pigeons. you are as inspiring as the price of spoons.

do not number among your fears that those imagined worlds might become as real as the world everyone believes in--the world you can see and touch and hear. because it’s already happening, and i don’t want you to be afraid. i want you to be as excited as i am. anything can come true if you write it down or say it out loud. once there was a morning when i imagined a boy rinsing worms from his clothes. i said so. i don’t always say so, or say anything at all. i didn’t know that back in my own room, in the pockets of my own coat, worms were crawling. tiny, white worms in plentitudes. where they came from is tied to the altogether other story of a russian reindeer with worm-eaten fur. i just want you to know that they were there, and they are here, and they might be here forever, because i do not know if they have planted their eggs in the lining of my coat or the wales of my trousers or in the quilting of my very blanket.

maybe it is their birthday.. i forgot to close the attic door last night.

you may remember me from the morning we milked music from the microphones. there was something red on the side of a hill, or in the branches of a dead tree. it lived, or rather died, behind the houses we grew up in, and was fun to climb. otherwise you may not remember me at all. i don’t think you do: septembers and septembers ago, there were black paws on a silver ladle. someday i will tell you about that story, and the cortege of dreams, of bushy tails, that flailed or followed in the aftermath.

now we must ask ourselves: will i be engulfed? and if so, by whom? there are fluffy foxen running beside the river of moths. i would like to be engulfed by them; i would wash the foxes’ mouths with a lullabye.

this is a wonderful morning. i don’t want to go to class! i can write myself into a state of tears, but i can’t cry. the last time i actually wept was in december, in chicago, when they started playing mayonaise. that is silly... you don’t know what a goose i am, because my feathers are arranged so carefully. the only times i have cried in the past many years have been either for horses or the smashing pumpkins. horses are always leaving my life. my life is always leaving my life.

i made you such a goose--

your friend,
hetty spag

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november 14. ye olde loneliness

two things that nearly made me cry today:

we learn about ourselves through the love of another--written in the margin of a robert creeley poem.

In a little over a week it will be Thursday, as foretold in prophecy. Yea, verily, on Thursday, Day 37 of the Season of Aftermath, Anno Mung 3167, there shall come a great gathering of vegan victuals the likes of which have not been seen in these lands for many moons. What prophecy failed to mention was that this shit's gonna be going down at my house around 5, yo. As always, followed by a thumb-wrestling tournament. I know you don't want to miss that.--written in an invitation to a potluck in a distant city.

i’ve started working on my first really big project, the kind of thing i came here to do. i’m making a puppetshow about a family of beavers! it began as a story for my children’s literature class since, for our final project, we have the option of writing our own historical children’s book. i wanted to write about events in the history of an animal in america instead of humans, because i don’t like humans. they’re mean. so at first i thought it might be about an adolescent buffalo, or a curlew, or some other creature whose species was devastated by people. but then i remembered my love of beavers, and i remembered how they were trapped nearly to extinction in the 18th and 19th centuries, so i wanted to tell their story to children and make them cry. i’m going to combine that project with one for my puppetry tutorial. it’s going to be a shadowshow. the puppets (two-dimensional shapes with sharp teeth and ever-slapping tails) will move behind a screen or curtain made bright by placing lanterns on the other side. i was really inspired by the sadness of shadows when the puppetual motion circus came here. sallie is going to do the music! i’m really excited. i must write all day. it is so fun to write with the possibility in my head of how the words and images will be translated into shadow puppets.

in other, much more disturbing news, i am making friends. it is fun to play with people. evan the boy is my pen pal now. our correspondence is done under doors. we write kind of stories to each other, things that happened during the day, but only in certain worlds. he told me the mccarthyites were pursuing him across the pond in a rowboat, claiming his poetry was slanderous to the country. i wrote back that i’d seen the few thousand origami geese he’d set loose there, their wings with blue and green feathers folded from kale. it is the kind of playing i like best, that most people don’t understand or don‘t want to do. my other new friend is evan’s best friend, who is always "sad" and "drunken"--he has the body of an otter. he’s in my poetry class. we've shared the notion that our silhouettes resemble those cast by famous presidents. mine looks like george washington's with its fluffy curls; his is abraham lincoln wearing a stovepipe hat. i went to his room yesterday, politely declining every offer of strawberry newtons and sexual intercourse. he introduced me to a lighthouse named lenore. she lives on top of a mountain outside his window. i looked at her through an empty wine bottle. later that night, alone in my own room, i spoke to lenore, and she told me about the reindeer. raskolnikov! he lives in that boy’s closet! i’m going to leave a trail of cold apples down the hall, to lure him into my room.

We mustn’t tell anyone (not even ourselves) how terrifying all of this is;

- - -

november 13.

the only creature who's like me in this house is a reindeer named raskolnikov in room 14.

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november 12.

uhm.. either i am sitting here looking at a note that's signed, "Love always, Evan," or it's my imagination.

things on my windowsill right now: ornamental lawn penguin, an apple, an orange, and two feet in grey socks.

i have dreams about people singing "tulip baroo" that are still very sad dreams.

i almost threw up last night over trying to return a book to someone. the anxiety over whether or not i could knock on their door made me physically sick.

i feel like i'm asleep even when i'm awake.

- - -

november 11.

i was awake when the first snow came to bennington around 7:15 this morning. everyone else was asleep!

- - -

november 10.
this weekend i am writing stories, not writing papers, eating cookies, not eating meals, reading akhmatova at work, not working at work, and being very naughty in general. i also need a bath.

the best things that happened today were feeding oranges to a sheep and evan playing my accordion on the floor. i have to try not to talk so excitedly whenever i see him.

"We're going to visit Brown Swiss cows!"
"Boneless cows?"
"No! Brown Swiss!"
"What?"

the worst thing was remembering there would be no waste thanksgiving for me this year.

- - -

november 8.

i dragged my accordion down from the hill. sallie is teaching me how to play a microphones song. we're going to win the talent show, and burn down a place on a mountain where people pay money to kill deer.

it is next to the grove of fir trees whose shapes spell out "peanut". you can see it when you fly over in a helicopter, or before the stork hurls you down my chimney.

"chimney" should have three syllables from now on. chi-min-ney!

that reminds me of chicago, and minneapolis.

i miss eating things that are not disgusting.

last night i was playing my accordion in the living room, and evan and his best friend even made an appearance to clap for me! they were smiling and wearing coats. it was beautiful! i will ask him to be in my band sometime. he has the voice of an immigrant terrier!

we tried to play them a lullabye around 2 in the morning, but then someone yelled at us and we had to stop barking and eat two bags of cookies.

i think i'll go ride my bicycle to new york this morning instead of to class.
- - -

november 6.

Sounds are part of a poem whether read aloud or silently to oneself whilst eating applesauce. Though I’ve found that dousing the applesauce with excessive amounts of cinnamon results in loud squeaks when the applesauce is embraced by the teeth, which is distracting, so please try to be more prudent.

ah. how i love writing papers! 5000 words you say? why certainly!

- - -

november 5.

sobs and vomit. it is like a funeral procession when i have to carry my bike around, or ask to borrow a book.

- - - -

november 4.

i think everything i say catches up to me. i had a brief conversation with evan on the stairs this morning about.. my bloody valentine.

- - -

november 3.

does anyone else want to be as dead as i do right now? no? um.. what about gingerbread? everyone wants gingerbread.

this morning we went to the second chance animal shelter in shaftsbury for an orientation so we could start volunteering there. big sunny rooms full of kittens! wiggly puppies! happy cats listening to bad music! it’s been so depriving not to be around animals. it was wonderful to feel them walking and wagging under my hands. just the physical and emotional presence of them. the place is nice, at the bottom of a mountain; they have two acres of fields where you can take the dogs to romp. we found someone else in our house who wants to volunteer there, and she drove us. a few nights ago i impulsively invited evan the boy to come too. i don’t know why.. he just seems so nice and gentle that i already believe he loves animals. he didn’t come, maybe because we went on a saturday morning, but there was a moment there i thought about him. a sign on one dog’s kennel said, "i do not like teenage boys," and i thought, no, no.. you would like evan. i know you would.

later on sallie and i rode bikes. i forgot to mention it’s the warmest november in the world. we stole a bag of apples from the dining room and took them to a white horse who i’d seen yesterday, grazing in a field. we really wanted to feed her the apples, and pet her, but the fence was set way back from the road. we left our bicycles and walked up the driveway. a man was there with his face buried in a truck engine. how strange it is to approach people. it makes me feel ten years old again, and dogless, brazenly knocking on a stranger’s door because they have a golden retriever in the backyard who looks bored and lonesome. we stood far away and called to the man, asking if we could feed the horse some apples we’d brought. for a second it was like maybe the horse wasn’t his at all, but his neighbor’s, because he didn’t seem to know what we were talking about. well, anyway, yes we could feed her some apples. and then some. i think we wound up being there for over an hour. you could tell the guy was really crazy and lonely, willing to talk to anyone about anything for as long as they stood there, untangling burrs from her white mane, touching her neck. she was old and quiet. he let us sit on her. he sort of grabbed sallie and flung her up. the pony couldn’t’ve cared less. i couldn’t’ve cared more. i hadn’t sat on a horse in six months.

the man smelled like the pair of high-tops i tended to wear without socks, in summer. also tobacco and homelessness. he showed us around his land. it was like my grandma’s house in milledgeville, with bicycles that his adult children stopped riding thirty years ago rusted and sinking into the earth. he had about five dogs, and kittens who we didn‘t see. the dogs were all chained up far apart from each other, restless, with plastic buckets full of dirty water and leaves. i wished, i wished he would’ve stopped talking, or just left us altogether. he spent ten minutes warning us about thorns, then i grabbed one off a bush and drew it across the back of my arm. it’s harder to bleed than it was. i wanted to walk in the trees and look quietly across to another mountain. it was so beautiful. i tied a branch of bittersweet around my head.

as we were pushing our bicycles up the big hill to school, i saw evan go past us in a car with his best friend. it seemed to split the day in two. i said, "i wonder why he doesn’t like me." sallie said something like that he probably just didn’t trust me, or believe me, and that, remember, he barely even knew me. i got all contentious. "there’s no such thing as ‘knowing’ other people, " i said. "it’s an invention." and so it is. sallie didn’t think so. she said you could know someone else; when you talk to them you find out things about them... "like what bands they like!" i spat sarcastically. then i jumped on my bicycle and rode home.

funny how i stand now at this age, in a dark hall in my end of the house with a cup of pudding, listening to them. earlier, they were singing, and someone was playing a guitar. i sit in my room all night. i pass through the hall to wash a spoon, but i stop. for a second. why do i keep caring. who the fuck are these people, and why don’t they let me play their reindeer games. open a window. the whole house smells like cinnamon. because i refuse to.

right now i wish somebody would sit on the end of my bed reading rimbaud, or the voyage of the dawn treader, and i could lie listening with eeyore in the quilts, but i am mean. so no one’s here, and no one ever will be. i am just going to have to cheer up about it.

it's bad to write these things.. they don't help me. i have so much schoolwork and stories that want my attention. since i read my website something like three times day, here would be a good place for me to tell myself to go do something noble, or beautiful, like fall out of a tree.

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november 2.

aside from kirk with a kite, my old bicycle is my best friend in the world. i hug it sometimes, just looking at it. it’s had a long life. even longer than mine. it has a permit sticker on the frame, from los angeles, from 1974, so it’s at least that old. we have been friends for about half a year. i used to have a yellow bicycle called porridge, but the two of us got hit by a car one day, and then porridge was stolen by thieves. i loved that bike a lot. i first had it when i lived in a little apartment. i didn’t have a lock so i used to wheel it into my bedroom with me. our adventures happened on summer nights, feeling the same wind as ducks and clouds; sometimes we paused outside an open window.

i rode my bicycle to new york this afternoon. not really on purpose. i just went for a ride on a cloud-covered day and eventually i was in a different state. i love the big, empty trees. especially those with tires in them. i thought about porridge for the first time in a long, sad while. i had forgotten that it was porridge who’d been on tour with me in iowa and kansas, and not the green bicycle i have now. the roads we went on today were unpaved. they pointed us past cornfields and old barns and huge hills. i was happy, but i felt a lot of missing too. i miss minneapolis. i miss my best friend. i sat by the road for a while, in some dead leaves, thinking about it. i got a letter from dallas today that said he’d built a tall bike--it’s blue. he showed her how he pushes off and gets up. "like a scooter at first," she said. i think of him riding across the 10th street bridge, where i passed him that biscuit-bound morning of my memory. he’s wearing a skirt, he‘s pedaling a tall bike--it’s blue. i wonder if he built it, in a garage or something, in october. on a street in south minneapolis, behind the house where he has lived his whole life, growing old and hating it. perhaps, too, hating his mother and father. a slow work, then time goes nowhere.

i am typing this on my computer with my feet in a pair of grey socks sticking out the window. it’s friday, and i think that means if i still lived in minneapolis i’d be at work, pricing books behind a desk. it would be cold, and my pants would fit better than they do now. of course i don’t want to be back there. but i wish i’d never left. all i needed there was a friend once in a while, and for the seasons to change. occasional cake and a bed and a bathtub. i just should have stopped going to school. when i feel enough, i can write. obviously i can write. but my heart is always muddy and in mud. articulation is such a living thing to be doing that most of the time i just can’t.

it’s not connected to creativity. having a sustainable crush on someone, for instance, who you never see or speak to, requires more creativity than the act of summoning up a story. or maybe it is just the same as a story, like it was for don quixote. he went on all those adventures for a lady whose reality was limited to the exact size of his desire and imagination. when i was in new york with my bike and lobster, i was wishing kirk were there too. i looked up and down the road for him. i even said it out loud. only words spoken all morning. the landscape seemed like part of a dream i was resuscitating ten years later, one of those without creatures besides myself. i looked down and i could see parts of my body. the clothes i was wearing could easily have been his clothes, my hands his hands, my shoes his shoes. we’re both quiet. we both like bicycles. we’re both vegan. and we wear the same color trousers.

i had the coloring contest entry he did hung up on my wall for a while, but i took it down. i found i didn’t need it.

supplementary materials:
only known portrait of porridge
only known portrait of my bicycle next to a giant pipe
tall bikes and minneapolis

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september & october
august
july
june
may
april
march
february
january
& december
& norris & the dreaded biscuits