january 29. wind lifting

you and i attempt to translate the rain. we record everything. we fill pages describing the formations of clouds, the fluttery feelings in our wrists, the grazing patterns of cows and sheep. our lives begin to take on the fluid quality of those who dream the same dream. our motions reflect each other’s. where one’s thoughts drop off the other’s begin. we work day after day to find the secret language of rain. when it finally comes we don’t notice. it falls on the roof, muted by snow, while we are both asleep. i dream of separating the walls of your heart, opening it like a pomegranate. it comes apart. there is a tiny well of water inside, a puddle. i wake up. the room is quiet. our notebooks cover the floor and lean in stacks against the walls, blocking out windows. in one corner sprawls our dismantled weather balloon. i lie waiting for you. your hand asleep in mine. the whole world held still, it seemed, with our sorrow.

the landscape smolders. somewhere, outside, we hear the rain tap on the street. we see the wet trees, the white sky... we close our eyes and see them. the branches tender, warm. we lie in the dark and describe to each other the sound of rain falling on different places. on memphis, on washington. on georgia and chicago and baltimore. the shape of the surface of the earth as described by the rain. i pretend your voice comes from a horn at the top of a pole. it talks to no one. it speaks of clouds, you name them; cumulonimbus, nimbostratus, altocummulus. i touch you and the voice stops.

i fall down my front steps. i watch it rain. it hasn’t rained in years. i must be changing.

(grave misfortune to be without my wellington boots tonight)

thrilled by thoughts of Cookie and Pie Team

prolonged strangled feeling from the previous night. deadness of appetite. forcefed quart of "frozen dessert" just to keep self company.

up the steps through open doors. premonition of samuel beckett, flying. i look across the cusp. diluvial feelings returning to earlier journey. sudden siege of remoteness; the vulnerability of saying anything at all. i’ve slept there, dreamt there, somewhere. the other side like a song. my body feels light. i put the satchel down. senses accelerating in the dark. i listen. i hear him, i hear the wind lifting his arms. he is over the river, the interstate, the plunging slopes of snow. his bones are filled with a strange, warm water. he grows heavier and heavier with despair. he sinks through january, approaching february. rigid pose of white. he is like a goose. a gull. a projection. i stand almost outside. the skylights shed. no more sky or earth.

- - -

january 28. the palace at 4 am

a glimpse out the window of a dark house. a view of a still, quiet place. it is full of snow. it is like a cradle. i push the smeared windows. life as shadow, as tenebrous dream. all unspoken thick in my throat. it hurts. i try to swallow. i want to get out of this place. it is not in minneapolis. it is in me. a point between the heart and the mouth, swollen passage with words tangled like snakes in the cradle, losing their way, disappearing.

i think my delusions are too big for me, almost like clown pants sometimes.

the things i could never say in english i'm learning to verbalize in lapine. "come close. please kiss me." it tickles. too much whiskers. i giggle helplessly and shake my head and roll over in bed.

what brings you joy?

blimps, mice, raisins

swans in the crust of the moon. some dreaming, some singing.

ecstatics of hearing someone say "rilke" aloud reinforcing morning's sense of sudden gratitude for the bookstore. always such a beautiful word. months ago i had a dream of peacocks in battery cages, of naming the peacock who i carried out after rilke. he was a boy peacock. don't ask me why they would put boy peacocks in battery cages, but they did. i think they were harvesting their feathers.

quiet resurgence of mood from previous night. expansive feelings lasting all the way up 'til one o'clock.

"What's the date today, the twenty-sixth?"
"that doesn't sound right at all."
"Twenty-seventh?"
"that sounds even worse."
"Twenty-eighth?"
"january twenty-eighth," dreamily, like it's my birthday. like something in the number makes me brave.

i'll wake up at night sometimes not even knowing what year it is or what state i'm in. i'll stare at the ceiling and think of the room in the top of the house hanging upside down on one side of the earth and, facedown in space, the roof looking up and out at the stars. i see animals. silent herds of sheep and deer, heartless and vacant eyed, roaming through the house; huge empty-headed cows nudging me in my sleep, breathing their sad breaths, looking for their brains, their lost lungs.

- - -

january 27.

enormous loneliness tonight.

- - -

january 26. a legend for fountains

morning after a sort of storm. autumnal. an orchestra of clouds.

dark clouds in luminous skyscape. clouds the color of cannons. tarnished clouds with bright eyes.

this is a day when i’m thirteen or fourteen. i’m sitting underneath my pony in an old potato field. he has on a big blanket that falls past his hooves; it touches the ground around us. i sit right behind his front legs, sometimes leaning against them. he eats bran mash from a wooden bucket and i watch what i can see of the clouds and listen to his teeth move. i feel underslept, gently nauseated. touch of vomit brought on by the damp chill and all the tramping and trudging.

december in shakerag, ga.
brown light above the fields.

we were supposed to go hilltopping this morning. after i found out they dragged the trails with fox urine i didn’t want to anymore. i said my pony was lame, that i was going to stay behind and wrap his feet and feed him something warm.

later in the day they shoot a horse who falls in the paddock and shatters one of her legs. i remember a bulldozer digging a hole for her. this big grey percheron. buried in the red clay.

i am upset when people yell at me. this morning i got yelled at for having half the bookstore in the dark. personally i like it that way. it was really quiet and nice; the spines and stacks were stained with shadows. all peaceful and clean like times long ago. the lady that owns the store did not seem not to agree. actually, she was in hysterics when she found the lights were out. arms lashing around like fish. she’s never yelled at me before, never used the acerbic tone with which she shrieked "I can’t believe this! This is totally unacceptable!" i was scared. i couldn’t say anything or even look towards her. i was almost crying to tell you the truth. "It’s like half of the store is just DEAD!" she screamed. for which i had my only response: "no not dead. just dreaming." which i thought was a nice thought. boy, did that make her mad. afterwards it was really silent and uncomfortable and i think she felt bad for being such a freak. she did apologize. she told me she’d just come in from a nukes meeting that hadn’t gone very well; she said it was how i would feel if i’d just come from a "bad chicken meeting". i didn’t bother to tell her that lately, all my chicken meetings have been bad chicken meetings.

of course the really scary thing will be having to sit in a bright place forever from now on.

the shipwrecked ginger ale truck outside of work this morning. i can see the snow falling even with my eyes closed.

- - -

january 25.

lying in bed around 10 o'clock with the blind spaniel barking in the backyard. memories tonight too heavy. can't even read more than a few pages.

the death of 10,002 andalusian horses.

nice emulsion in the bath this morning. illusion of drowning clouds.

words like 'this' and 'these' being really sort of tragic. implication of substance like having dreams about being awake.

i keep waiting for someone to ask me what castor oil is made out of so i can say "poisonous stars" to something other than the wall.

- - -

january 24. parsnip juice & oatmeal cookies

strangely hungry tonight; cooked and ate entire package of falafel, then tofutti, ginger snaps, and lemonades. afterwards wrapped in badger blanket up to my face, crawling around rather bored, suddenly on the kitchen floor remembering mysterious phone message left on my machine when i still lived in the apartment. i had forgotten all about that. i like it when the ginger snaps are soft and chewy. i also like it when they're hard and abrade the mouth. the recording that used to be on my machine was of me playing the saw and singing wordless songs. i never plug my telephone in anymore.

caribou consciousness (never looking anyone in the eye)

my father used to hold me aloft above the streets of new york city. he carried me for blocks, spinning me in circles, bringing me close to the windows of secondhand bookshops where i'd float for just a moment, eye to eye with a big cat or a cockatoo behind the glass. by the time i was nine i thought i was an airplane. my father would be gone for weeks, and i took to hurling myself down flights of stairs.

when i'm in bed at night i let myself make up stories about the noises that come from nowhere. a leaf scuttling across the roof is a raccoon in a bicycle basket; the wind on the street is a euphonium floating through the sky, playing itself like an incomplete message. what i hear all the time is the sound of hen moving her sleeping bag around. i turn the lights off and she starts building a nest with it. it's sliding all over the hardwood floor, scritch scratch, and the hound tossing and turning and trying to get everything just so. and the story i make up for this noise is always the same. because the sounds of dogs and humans settling down to sleep on a sleeping bag are indistinguishable, especially in the dark.

- - -

january 23. vehicular homicide

driving home around midnight i accidentally ran over a low-hanging cloud. she exploded into a million pieces.

the man with no voice, no lovers

in an empty room, a piece of paper has fallen behind the radiator. his ear is pressed between her shoulder blades, she is holding a piece of ribbon which is tied to a chicken's neck. the chicken is black. they are sitting on the floor. the girl and the chicken are the only ones who can see under the radiator.

i left eeyore in a dream last night. i was carrying him through a big empty house, and in one room i put him down on a chair, one of these old chairs my family's had for 200 years or something (i have one now in my bathroom), the only piece of furniture on the entire second floor and it was almost like a throne. i wandered through the other rooms; i kept telling myself not to forget eeyore. i opened a closet and found hanging there a bunch of vintage marching band jackets. one which was almost identical to my own except it had a cowbell sewn to the collar. i wore it around, very excited. never went back for poor eeyore. luckily he was still in the sheets this morning.

- - -

january 22.

it's bedtime! hurray!

we're driving late at night. we cross the river. factories pass us by. i don't understand why for a second things look clearer than in dreams, the smokestacks and the still white clouds. like a doe in my boat i hear...

"can you say this?" i ask.

he removes his hat with his right hand.

"shrimp eyes glancing up through the waves. i am asleep on the ocean liner with my arm over the albatross's wings. the moon moves. we float for a thousand miles."

- - -

january 21.

whispering "ichabod" repeatedly at 3 am. cold, sick-feeling, but somehow grateful to be alone.

the thoughts and possibilities of becoming a badger are really very distracting. sometimes it is the only thing on my mind.

sat in the bookstore with lights out for over an hour this morning. brief peaceful feeling with daylight in the front windows, the recesses and alcoves further back still dark and asleep. written on a scrap of paper shaped like massachusetts.

a real loss when the day had to start.

- - -

january 20. Home is human haggis

now i am tied to my pecan tree. they have a bridle on my face. the flour sack has been turned inside out and i can see the hands of the body open on the ground, looking up at the stars. i try to see its face but the reins are too short. the fingers move! now the hands are swinging, dangling at the end of its arms like two possums from a moonlit branch! they’re picking it up, they’re heaving it onto my back.

actually that was a lie, the part about tonight being nice. i don't even know why i bother to say stuff like that. there is no such thing as a nice night. you're either lonely or pretending not to be.

i am trying to write a story about a mule who is travelling across the countryside with a corpse tied to her back. it isn't going so well; i need graham crackers. it is the sort of story one must be eating graham crackers in order to write.

- - -

january19. carnival

Last night I dreamt there was a demon in the bakery...

i'm going to get myselfmade into an action figure. it can play with my edward scissorhands action doll and they can do naughty things. it's sort of expensive but i think this is my one true chance.

the stuffed owl which had been won in ring toss or shoot-the-chutes, its eyes missing, its face rubbed off on the pirate's sleeve.

epiphany of ale wagon with penguins around 1 pm, parked in the glittering snowdust. saw someone wearing winter hat embroidered with skunks. a real delight.

otherwise suicidal.

- - -

january 18.

let the tub fill with water. underslept feeling kneeling on the floor. the shade’s peeled back partially frozen, there is a cleanliness of light the morning after snowfall, the clock breaking with your face pressed against the bathtub. some face pressed singing against your spine. death kissing your eyes. a muscle flutters along the column like moth wings forming words on the skin. his black hair on fire in an envelope of forgotten names. it is a hallucination and i have to get up to stop the record. there is a mirror in which i sometimes accidentally see my body. i don’t know where it came from. the water is feet deep almost tumbling over, the galleon full of blinded horses flaming on the waves. i want my own ocean. i want the tide to pull the moon in through my bathroom window. warm ears hear everything. the underwater symphonies. water clear and grey and deliriously choking on my hands. i decided not to take a bath. i found pennies and threw them in, making the most evil wishes while they tumbled to the bottom, like outstretched in the driveway with propellers spinning down.

- - -

january 17.

there is no backtracking.
there are imprints on the pillow.

nice moment weeks ago on the street reemerges. clarity of seeing around 2 or 3 am. the moon full and low over the roof of one particular house whose windows summon a view of light on the narrow staircase inside. the name of the shape i wouldn’t know, but a soft piece of geometrical glass. ice underfoot breathing up, almost lifting. it was like being inside a diorama, climbing aboard the goose who will take you to the other side of the city.

going back ever since, there has been a streetlamp on just to the left of where i was standing. and it ruins everything. i knew the night the house was a watery, sugary blue color of moonlight. windows gone pale, snow rolling towards the street. that lamp wasn’t there, the stupid thing, or it wasn’t turned on. i’ve been sort of upset about it.

i had two dreams last night. i cross from one into the other through the window of my bedroom. strangely believed, i feel the vinyl shade clinging to and sliding off my back. i dream i’ve woken up, that i’m standing in my room. it becomes the second dream that’s so vividly dreamt by the first. he flies up and turns off the streetlight; it has a switch like a desk lamp. it’s finally dark. when i go through the window, some small amount of nightlight is spilling in behind me and around the lines of my own shape on the floor. there is some purity about this. i walk through the room feeling alive and afraid. it’s very quiet; everything more intensely felt than real life. there is this house again with its windows broken and the ocean of snow. here it is held partially aloft. the space underneath is like a theater. i am standing at some distance and the light cast is teal, almost underwater, and there are a few people "on stage" whose relations have been forgotten or were unrealized to begin with. i fly inside, the house is really like a shell, almost like a dresser at the top with its numerous drawers in what used to be an attic. everything is painted white and i’m afloat, opening all the drawers. at the same time looking out and being able to see mountains. i don’t remember the actual story behind any of it. someone throws a knife up at me (40 or 55 ft off the ground), but i remain unstabbed. the person is dressed like a magician in coattails and eventually i’m forced to kick my way through another window. at one point having "fuck you" said to me and the intertwining of the january 4th memory seeing this written on sidewalk with reading the catcher in the rye at the same time in previous years, as many as twelve or thirteen.

- - -

january 16.

www.banbatterycages.org

- - -

january 15. the haunted tornado

got under my electric blanket to read (finally have my paws on a copy of frank stanford's 15,283 line poem, the battlefield where the moon says i love you) around 12:30 last night, read perhaps two pages before pretty much passing out, wasn't awake again 'til seven this morning.

nice raspberry/blueberry muffin for breakfast.

- - -

january 14. ear of rory

you can't spell arouse without carousel. or possibly the other way around.

do you see hedgehogs on your walks? samuel beckett used to spend entire days walking by the ocean. i read that once, when he was young, he put a hedgehog inside a hatbox because he wanted to protect her from the torrential rains who were falling at that time, but she was forgotten and died alone, and turned to mush inside the darkened box. but i wish i had an ocean to walk next to anyway; that sounds so nice.

I never heard that hedgehog story about Beckett. The stories about his boils and pustules fascinate me - when they got so bad all he could do was wrap them up and lay in bed rocking back & forth - they stopped time for him.

what a shame to be awake for so long and feel so little.

i wish i would encounter a badger in a snowstorm. that would be magical.

- - -

january 13.

what'm i forgetting, besides my breath?

- - -

january 12. dead imagine

hold the lantern. higher, you are going home.

turn towards january. you see stars pause through the smashed-out window. you wet your mouth on them; the tongue snaps back. swallow slowly. you are doomed to fail sleeping in this direction.

night’s journey approaching carousel. there are painted horses with wooden hearts and frozen fetlocks. you circle the platform. the carousel plays music like the moment before ice cracks, when the sheets underneath are bruising white with the weight of the wanderer.

extravagant hound. the cavalcade of unicorns. the carousel’s bleating entrails.

alight upon celestial residue of tomorrow...

last night i heard your voice in the radio tower. i am cold, there are too many colors. someone draws a diagram on a piece of glass. the unloved represented in a pool of chalk. i wake up around 4am and turn off my electric blanket without thinking. for some reason a very vivid moment holding eeyore against me in such a way that his ears fall down across my shoulders, my mouth in his mane. premonition of creative siege, but i go back to sleep. towards morning prolonged, diverse dreams awakening me to a totally different state. no hot water for the bath.

- - -

january 11.

sleep is lovely, death better still. to have not been born is of course the miracle.

- - -

january 10.

this seemed rather to belong to some story heard long before, an instant in the life of another, ill said, ill heard, and more than half forgotten.

"i'm only doing this because i think you need it."

well. of course. why the fuck else would anybody ever touch me, but as an extraordinary gesture of altruism. everyone knows it's impossible that another person simply like me. everyone knows that.

speaking of being full of shit, i think there's something really wrong with me, medically.

sometimes a bed presents itself as a glorious sleigh, a point of entrance and exit for the imagination and the world. i sleep in the bed i slept in as a child, that my dead grandpapa slept in as a child. the ironwork is simple, only slightly rusty, without punctuation except the dogwood blossoms, two apiece for the head and the foot. altogether the frame reminds me of a crystal cage or a floating birthday cake. it has a presence; sometimes it inspires such a resurgence of feelings and forgotten places.

there was a moment last night, just before i left the house, when going into the bedroom to retrieve my armadillos brought suddenly such a gentle affection as i leaned down across the blankets, esp the “badger blanket” (very soft, roan connotations, like a blanket for ghosts), evoked in a colorless light, the watery kind that moths love. i wasn’t sure what i felt. it was like leaning over a stranger’s bed, a child’s bed. i saw the faces of my animals tangled there, the lobster, the bunny, the donkey; the personality of the dead objects i have grown up with and around at that moment being just so vivid.

i once saw a photo of pablo neruda’s bed. it looked like people had died in it. that is the sort of bed i find attractive.

this has been a somewhat detached, peaceful morning so far, without socks. i do not mind waking up after a night when people have written beautiful things far away from me.

- - -

january 9. ships sunken under snow

it just kills me to be walking late at night and see a stupid television set flashing aimlessly up in the third story window of one of those beautiful old houses. when my gills are bursting with inspiration, when i am practically about to pass out from the desire to shut myself away in a place out of time, above the world (the idyllic "high wire crane's nest in the branches"), and write there for centuries, completely lost to the creation. it kills me that people in beautiful old lofty rooms are just sitting there at 2am, trying to find something on the television they can stand to look at.

vomited in the kitchen sink and went for somewhat uplifting walk in the warm wind of januaries.

Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.

there's a ratty washcloth who lies across the radiator in my bathroom. it was blue, once. now it is like a sky that can only happen over the sea. i rub my face off on it and little granule bits fly into my eyeballs.

not a lousy morning, despite historically bad muffin disappointment (banana walnut, gluey, reminiscent of childhood baking catastrophes)

presence of weather as living thing, cleanliness.

got a few sentences written around 1 pm..

daydreamt for hours in bed this morning, that i was a living person. black sand and licorice ligaments.

blast. i'm ready for it to be christmas now.

- - -

january 8.

girl in store tonight,
chestnut hair, camel coat
pulling off mittens.
reminded me of someone.
"someone i used to know," i might like to say, but i can’t.

previous night’s excursion into new rooms of old house
precedes dream of hacking small pony and back to sleep
much must have been lost, something about having sculpted woodwork as though decorating a fireplace (trying to fall asleep: “snowflakes in the fireplace”) - giraffe, greyhound, numerous opossums
vivid enough, more than real life.
can’t remember where nicole came in, but she did.

gratitude for the gift of dream, even if hallucination.

It is not sufficient for your parents to have not claimed you on their tax returns. In addition to being genuinely self supporting with no financial support from your parents, you will have to have been living on your own and be able to document an estranged relationship with your parents ( eg court protection from abuse orders, social worker reports, etc.) or other equally unusual circumstances (eg. parents both incarcerated). You are an independent student when you pass 24 or get married or are the sole support of your own child.

i had a dream i had a baby. it lived on the porch and i just tossed it some evaporated milk dust every once in a while.

does that count?

dear mum,
need you and da to throw some rocks at me. be over wednesday.
love, sarah

- - -

january 7.

annoyed with ar group, no more feelings of "giving up" anything in minneapolis.

around 5 30 walking with hen
gorgeous owl flying low, landing in tree across the street -
nicest moment of the last million.

only nine, ready to spend rest of night in bed with book and stale cookies.

- - -

january 6.

early night nap
waking up to airplane noises

hypnagogic vision of darkened interior with loved one & gleaming pastry box.

- - -

january 4.

look - the stars have come to take your place. everything so vivid outside at night. seems to unfold like lost landscapes of the past. i stand in my nightclothes and hen gallops up and down the warm street. brief, healthy emotion of transcendence.

possibly life is waiting.. with it some feeling bigger than disappointment, loneliness..

like the moon between two houses, the moment between two words.

infinite magic of nature and imagination.

or nothing at all. a completely delusional, cavalcading monster who cannot exist in the world as a real person.

a feeling out of time tonight. detached at work, elsewhere. reading apollinaire, rereading the neverending story. warm melty day with zestful breezes reminded me of other years and places. heavy mood leftover from this morning never went away, not that i expected it to. aimless resentment while thinking about people.

i try to care about my future, but i don’t. it already seems too late for everything. there used to be an unyielding need to write, something strong inside my stomach, but it’s gone. no real emotions anymore. never present. bored to death.

everything is so detestable! ha ha ha!

heard music at 1 am last night. definite and beautiful - sequestered under watery sounds of radiator. source undetermined, meaningless.

dreamed that a crow flew through the windowpane without breaking it and lighted upon my chest (in bed). took him into the bathroom and opened the window for him to fly out.

- - -

january 3. the decapitated remains

imagine us buying a box of doughnuts and going to the planetarium. the hovering sweetness, like looking in a cake window.

We would have a healthier and less traumatized society if we touched each other less often

The reoccurring dream is of an empty rowboat floating between glaciers. She sees it there, through cloud fragments; she is below circles of calling curlews or else she is one of them, or else she is the last one. Alone up there, following the boat that inches towards tomorrow morning. Tonight it runs partially aground. It is aimless, gets stuck sometimes for days before moving off again, nowhere. She comes back nightmares later and it is still sitting there; now the carcass’s socks are dangling over the edge. Maybe, a mile away, a harp seal plunges. The grey water rocks, it slides off the ice. The sun is a transparent smear in the sky.

- - -

january 2. i remember writing that. i remember writing that the night i thought i saw him singing.

great silence of the giraffe, press your bruises against mine..

i am in love with a boat.

suddenly very happy.

if i didn't have to eat to keep myself company.
if i didn't have to read to hear another voice.

if you knew me. if you knew that i am me.

- - -

january 1. song for oceans falling

woke up with one hour of sunlight left. i was too late. it was already upon my grave, filling my stomach. i wanted to remember a dream because julian had been there.. the bottom floor of the house was flooded and there were pieces of furniture floating all around. but i could not remember. i was standing by a window, assaulted by the sun. outside was a steep granite hill with empty swingsets; someone opens the door (i am in an underground place like a bunker) and tells me to go swing. they mention rainbows. i did not notice any rainbows. i look out again and it is raining. teenagers are on the swings, laughing with their heads thrown impossibly back as if the throatskin might break at any moment. i dig the burial site with my own paws. deep enough to let me sleep through morning after morning.

it gave the impression of being inside a christmas box.
awake only to herself.

slept to different voices. especially a cat, crying in the snow circle. i opened my window but no one was there. just silence with its feathers and claws. i sat much longer in the darkened room, remembering moments of october when i could still write, and the closet spilling its past out, and the warm afternoons.

outside, light touches the scalp. lying somewhere there, in its bed of flakes and blood.

Century oh century of clouds

- - -

& december