march 27.

a favorite sort of moon in iowa that night, hairline crescent. sometimes the feeling is so much one that i cannot move or speak.

on tuesday morning it was spring.

i had to get my bike tires replaced before i left ames. the back was flat and the front was striated with deep grooves from where it had spent all winter cracking beside my porch. the person at the bike shop informed me it was "bad" that i didn’t have any brakes in a tone like i wouldn‘t‘ve been able to ascertain this myself. "i can stop with my feet!" i insisted, and left for kansas. it was like floating down a river in the sun and warmth.

driving through southern iowa and suddenly feeling overwhelmed with a desire to roll down a hill. there were many beautiful yellow hills rising up on both sides of the high way. i saw horses in fields and hawks in trees and old farmhouses with things growing up through the kitchen floorboards. i remembered that this was an unglaciated part of the world, where the hills had been able to survive. i pulled over at a place where the land ascended into the sky. it was much steeper than my tobogganing hill in minneapolis, who is the only real hill i‘ve known in the past three years. i noticed a feeling like a song that could take place at the top and i was running up and up.. it was so warm; i pulled off my coat and threw it on the fence, galloped another fifty feet and took off my sweater too. i felt the air touch my arms like someone nearby was lifting a lantern. i ran and ran, haphazardly and in figure eights.. there was my heart, my legs! i could feel them. exactly the opposite feeling of when i am sitting so still and suddenly i am scared to move an inch or even breathe very much.. every muscle hardens like stiff pieces of barge rope... it happens around other people.

i stopped when i thought my lungs would burst like exploding fruit-filled croissants. i took off my shoes. i flapped my arms on the edge of the hill. my awkward shadow lay next to me in the grass. i was wheezing, but it sounded beautiful. it was louder than anything. it was bigger than the wind or the giant engines of trucks that went hauling past every few minutes. the highway was so far below me and i could see all these fields under the blue sky like they were different layers of the same cake. i lay down on the rim of the hill and started rolling exuberantly.. laughing and shrieking "wheeee!" until i was a slobbery, giggling mess in a ditch by the side of the road. i lose myself. i can‘t stop laughing. like old nights when i would stay up in my closet and work myself into a feverish hysteria over some stupid thing and pee in my pants. it was the funnest thing.

at last i took some badger stories with me to the prairie. i had to crawl between the barb wire fence. it was like a place where someone really could lie next to a badger whose fur was soft and smelt of gardens. i shouted the words as loud as i could; they were the ones about storms and rain and white dorsal fur. i returned breathless to the car. i sang with bright eyes records and ate cookies and enjoyed the fact that i was alive in a beautiful world full of such wonder and feelings. my world!

an hour later, i stop for gas. a livestock trailer is parked there without a driver in the cab. my heart sinks. the whole parking lot is filled with the sound of cows lowing. i go over to the trailer and can see them, holsteins, their big, gentle faces, their eyes staring back at mine. i put my hands through the slats and their warm breaths touch me. i feed them sugarcubes from my coat pockets - they take them like ponies. i’ve seen so much of the horror that happens to animals.. i’m not sure why this particularly is so painful, but it spills over all at once. the tears come up like vomit. i lost control, the same intoxicated feeling as rolling down a warm hill, except this was uncontrollable misery instead of joy. i started sobbing, saying "it's going to be alright, it's going to be alright..."

of course it wasn’t.

everything with the animals, it's never something you forget about entirely, even when you feel ok it's still something you're carrying around inside you, all the things you've felt and seen. but when you're happy and feeling so alive it comes back like this nightmare that's a death sheet on the world.

- - -

march 26. scenes from the prairie remnant

voyage dream shown on a sort of map. there is sun without warmth. there are three clouds in the sky who look like divided lobes of a healthy lung.

i’ve been driving all morning. the spirit with which i started the trip sinks as i realize what i’ll be going past for the first four hours. death. sight of death, scent of death, close your eyes and feel the car more straight. corpses decorate the side of the road. deer. raccoons. birds upside down with their wings still feeling the sky. i think of what this season has meant for the wild animals. how long and cold it’s been.. how little they’ve found to eat. survive the winter to get hit by a car on the verge of spring.

and you lift your eyes to a landscape full of pig farms. flesh factories. metal sheds squatting everywhere; there’s nothing else to look at. you know what it’s like inside. you’ve heard their voices. listen past your stupid belle & sebastian records.

(you start daydreaming of dynamite, and a procession of pigs from the barns. hogs trotting in frisky parade.. smelling, seeing the blue sky.. tears keep filling the inside of your face. there will never be enough vegans to stop all this. it will never stop for a good reason because people are not good. how you’d evacuate the place and then blow it to smithereens.)

i pushed my bike over the ice and walked through tall crunchy grass that had been tangled and flattened by the wind. there were markings of snow between the clumps. my sneakers got very wet. i set my stool down - it was horribly wobbly out there - and began to play. it was cold and windy and wretched and my fingers were freezing to the blade of the saw, but i was playing a song in the cold yellow sunlight and for a moment that was all that mattered. two geese passed at a distance. the day still had some dying left to do. i went back to my car and created a comfortable place on top of my pillow and sleep-sack to lay back for a while and read and eat cookies.

fifty miles outside of ames i pause at the prairie remnant. thrilling view of sweeping descent with trees congregating on the different edges. i mount my bike, whose brakes do not work, and take flight down the slope. as i coast into the field below i realize i’ve flattened a tire.

utterly failed trying to have a friend for a few hours. silly how i’d get so excited about that sort of thing - all the pageantry of slumber parties. i felt sorry for andrew. he was one of tummyache.com’s old fans who’s been nice enough to keep emailing me and stuff even after it was gone and i stopped writing things on the internet... he offered to let me borrow his floor in iowa to sleep on, which was awfully nice. i still hate that i would come to someone after this ongoing narrative (years of it) and be so not-present. i’m just this girl who can’t say anything. always somewhere else.

at one point we were sitting in his bedroom and i wanted to hear engine. certain songs would resuscitate long-buried feelings; it was like having my insides crushed by the notes. i can’t say what old memory connects me to that song... i have to hold my teeth together whenever i hear it. i’d forgotten all those nights i used to spend lying on the floor of my apartment, listening to the voice in the headphones and unable to remove myself from either the physical or emotional state of a dead depression until i just stopped the record and tried to sleep. maybe i was overcome with self-pity. i don’t know. my insides got all mushed up. i sat there trying not to cry. i just sat there staring at the wall.

- - -

march 25.

due to previously documented evidence that i cannot play saw in a pair of mittens, the badger has doubts debut performance in st. paul minnesota with a box of doughnuts has been postponed until a later, warmer date.

this morning i saw my breath cast its own shadow.

- - -

march 23. we would die without vowels

I fell for the promise
of a life with a purpose

i drive; i stare up at the trees. i imagine turning into something that could move through the branches, like a ribbon or a plastic bag. i become smaller and smaller. the wind blows through me. i am no bigger than a pastry kerchief. i float between trees and wires and telephone poles without touching them. without touching anything.

yesterday, my mom tried to hug me. i wouldn’t let her. "who do you think i am," i said. she got angry and started yelling at me. i told her she was being a freak. she went into the basement and refused to answer any of my questions. i asked her if i could eat some of the pecans my dad’d brought home from milledgeville. "no touching, no talking," she said.

it suddenly all made sense.
unfortunately.

i would like someone to touch me. in the right way, in the right places. the axillary node under my right arm. that is my favorite place in the whole world to be touched.

but i don’t need to be greedy.. i would just like someone to sit in the same room as me. not even necessarily on the same piece of furniture... though that would be nice, especially if we felt tired and swollen with sleep and they laid their head on my stomach and without a word let me touch the bottom of their neck like you touch a cat who’s curled dreaming on the hammock of skin that hangs off your ribs.. no! GREED! bad.

how do you invite someone to sit with you?

OLEE (eee)

i sort of miss thomas jefferson.

- - -

march 22.

asparagus and cornbread and cherry cider.

i hope spring never comes. i feel like i'm in love.

- - -

march 21.

asparagus and orangeade.

people sure have invented some stupid ways of paying attention to each other.

grackle just landed outside my window. excited noises about the mush of animal crackers left over from winter.

they’re shooting me into space to name new planets. i spend most of the dream waiting around impatiently for my parents to drive me to the launchsite. we’re in atlanta. it’s high autumn. we start driving down our old street in one of those huge vans like the one for chicken rescue, except it’s even bigger, and even messier, and much brighter now, because it’s daytime. i sit in the back and listen to my parents’ conversation as if hearing it take place in another room. it turns out my dad is not my biological father and that my real last name is "berryman." i stare out the window as the van seems to float down the street. the old trees are huge and beautiful, with white bark and richly-colored fall leaves. i have some thought that i’ve only missed seeing this because i take a different route to get onto 94 (mixed up with fact that we could take two different streets to leave the neighborhood, and i much preferred one to the other).

standing around waiting to go into space. a horse is coming with me. he’s tacked up in a dressage saddle and has the rotting sleeves torn from a “pirate jacket” wrapped around his legs. he’s very impatient and i keep having to tighten the girth. once we’re finally able to get into our spaceship, i realize i’ve forgotten my notebook, in which i wrote the names for the new planets (they’d discovered three). so i can’t go. i wake up inside the dream; i find my notebook and open it to find i’d named all the planets "raspberry."

further on in the dream i actually meet john berryman, or his ghost. he is looking for his lost name.

- - -

march 20.

desultory excitement, restlessness, lasting well past normal bedtime.. i can't pay attention to proust for more than a couple pages. i want to jump over fences. i want to roll down a hill. remember late afternoon light standing in bedroom to hear the solitary goose-honk.. she flapped further on; i could see the beach and the phonograph and the iron bed half buried in the sand. felt like many cold greasy mornings in mentone. like something's on fire a mile down the coast.

portrait of the river before i start dreaming: water turns from white to grey.

"now i can chew your veins out."
"flirt."

nice night for wellington boots and free mac 'n' cheese (prepare the recipe and play along at home! (it's secretly better without peppers)).

you used to have such a longer list

laughter in the bathtub
the way a packed lunchbox (or picnic basket) looks
wet trees at night
when the music tapes are coming to your town
the sound of a lonely goose-cry
the feeling of a horse rubbing his head against you, and
the feeling of his muzzle in the palm of your hand

the days I spend in the classrooms are like caltrops thrown in the path of my ponies with my dreams their riders

another bad dream last night. i am in a mall (it gets worse); everyone has decided it's a good idea to bring their cats to the mall. they have something like cat-sitting while you shop, but it's actually an evil scheme to obtain kitties for laboratory experiments. i see cats sliding down metal chutes and falling through balcony slats and dying on the first floor. my own cat, tiger, from when i was little.. i had a general feeling that he was there. i was calling his name. something like a sister dream to this one i used to have a lot where i'm standing on the back deck at my old house and it begins not exactly to crumble, but undulate, and the railing's fallen off.. that's how the cats were sliding across the floor on their stomachs.

- - -

march 19.

"the odor of the teens wafted down the sidewalk. they smelled like cereal and remorse."

there's this boy i've always liked who comes into the store every few months. he was the one in my dostoevsky class last year, who never said anything. he reads all the same things i was reading in olympia, and it makes me lonely for that time. or just lonely. he came in tonight to sell some books. nabokov, pynchon, borges, and then some bollingen stuff that i don't have the energy to care about. he had one book, implicit meanings: essays in anthropology, with a drawing of a pangolin on the cover. "a pangolin!" i observed gladly, "we pay top dollar for pangolins." he looked at it and said, "i always thought it was a sloth." i shook my head and looked crestfallen.

..but i wish i could say things to people.

lay in bed sick most of the morning alternately reading proust and the wedge's bakery menu. no mention of pound cake in either text. i can barely move my feet.

had a nightmare last night that my bicycle was sent to georgia to have its brakes fixed and my dead grandpapa broke it and threw it under his porch. my tornado plans were ruined. a rhinoceros got in trouble at some sort of garage sale and commander blop was wearing a neutral milk hotel t shirt.

- - -

march 18.

i want a house someday. with my very own thermostat.

tonight i went to a root beer float party. i am not good at parties. i hate them. i drove christy there, we had our floats, then both decided we felt sick and cold and went upstairs to take a nap. i dreamt my blood tasted like strawberries. i rode on a rocking horse for a few minutes and then we went home. sadly, there was nowhere to get a hysterectomy on the way back.

a few nights ago i had a dream where i went inside my body and saw what was wrong with my eyes.. what had been making them hurt so much. they were impaled on toothpicks. my brains were made of teabags.

for breakfast i am having tea and an atomic fireball! it's.. like a zesty hunk of corn starch, basically.

- - -

march 17.

i've made a 50-minute story tape and t shirts for badger has doubts. they will be for sale on my upcoming tour. i'll give a free tape to anyone whose floor i can sleep on.

- - -

march 16.

brought entirety of remembrance of things past home from the store today. sort of thing you feel no shame over when you fall asleep and crunch all the pages.

i actually didn't mean that in a negative way.. um.

drowsy as hell since the weather turned. huge appetite with no enjoyment in eating. saw a really nice puppetshow tonight. first they did abstract puppets: giant geometrical shapes spinning to piano music (twin sisters sat at either side of the stage playing stravinsky); then petrushka. with wooden chickens and disembodied hands. puppet hands to manipulate the puppets in the play. the puppeteers all wore black velvet and black veils like beekeepers.

nice names (ongoing list):
lemony snicket
basil twist

i really bet i have some fucking disease or something.

- - -

march 15. existential crunch

"my favorite doughnuts in the world come from bosa doughnut bakery in st paul minnesota.
sugar raised
cinnamon raised
vanilla raised
maple raised
but i was raised by badgers, not cinnamon."

i wish ben marcus would write another book. tired of buying every single obscure literary magazine he prints a story in only to vomit at 95% of the remaining content.

sometime around christmas (i can't remember which one), i paid for a lifetime subscription to mcsweeney's, but it never comes. presumably my subscription expired after the first issue because i'm dead, which i must've missed, which is somewhat anti-climatic, considering.

david markson published a new book at the beginning of this month which i still haven't gotten to buying.

i dream of people evacuating the cities. imagine new york and chicago and memphis and seattle all as ghost towns. i bet someday they will be. i think in my lifetime people are going to start dying in amazing numbers. it will be out of their control.

That crispy snacks so overpower us is because, as an existentialist philosopher might say, they represent an "authentic" form of existence which transcends the desire for softer, "unreal" foods, such as Twinkies.

i don't know about that... i actually prefer soft ginger snaps to the ones that make your mouth bleed. i can sometimes be found in the cookie aisle palpating a bag of mi-dels in order to determine their resistance, and will choose those who seem the most pliable.

- - -

march 14. legacy of the sugar devil (and other stories)

deluge of spring in minnesota. i think i have spinal meningitis. it feels like i’m being pierced through the eyes.

i’ve been experiencing a sudden distaste for baked goods. i want to eat only asparagus and pommelo for the remainder of my life. decided that last night and promptly ate cookies, doughnuts, bread, and more cookies today. oh, and raspberries. never buy discount raspberries, they have fleas in them. not vegan.

my parents always used to say i was possessed by the sugar devil. his existence cannot be proven, but it can be imagined, which is just as good. the sugar devil was like a mouse who lived in the pantry and ran away whenever you began to open the door, so i never saw him, but i knew he was there. i would often hear him singing sweetly in the cupboard. he played the cookie jar and the biscuit-tin, lightly tapping on the lids with his sharp, candy-coated fingernails. he was a nervous, fidgety sort of demon, prone to tearing out his beautiful hair, which was made from long braids of black licorice. i had to devour these quickly whenever i found them, lest my evil parents discover the sugar devil was an actual man and promptly poison him with cauliflowers! that would have been disastrous. my appetite would have grown very cold in his absence, leaving me starved and uninspired. so i kept his true identity a secret. we encountered each other only in clandestine moments of ecstasy and pound cake. even then his presence was intangible, ever-fleeting, implied by a wafting odor of vanilla ice cream that breathed through his colorless skin.

met you in a dream last night. you found me with a telescope. thank you for the astonishing things that you said, and for the open-mouth kiss... i don’t really see why you tried to stab my eyes out with a drafting instrument later on.

- - -

march 13.

i'm brusque. i didn't want to be brusque. no wonder no one likes me.

"you can play the kazoo with a slurry of tongues."

the clouds are holding so still tonight..

i tied grey ribbons in my hair and went to walk in the park for a long time. there were a few hours when the sun was not visible, but it was still warm enough to wander around without mittens. there’s a nice path that winds through woods and looks down on a creek. checked under a wooden bridge for billy goats, but they weren’t there. place still filled with halloween feelings. snow-flooded estuary with the appearance of deepest winter. i walked with hen along a ridge above a valley of trees. in the uppermost branch of the tallest tree sat a crow. he was the last thing you could see before the sky.

detestable to walk around some stupid park in minneapolis remembering a summer in the shenandoah valley. i really should live somewhere with hills. hills never fail to excite. i just know these places remember who they were...

got a 98 on my quixote mid-term. the professor said i should "consider speaking in class."

neat interview with norman juster (the phantom tollbooth)

- - -

march 12.

there is only a short window of opportunity to be had before the pattern evaporates completely

there used to be this six year old with a snow-cone stand by the road on the way from atlanta to athens. he advertised a million flavors of snow-cone.. obscure things like peanut brittle and butter pecan that no one would ever think of wanting a snow-cone to taste like. i think i had a crush on him for a few years and i still have very excited associations with going to athens because of it. i wonder if he's still there. all grown up like me standing on the side of the road with these crazy snow-cones that no one wants.

sourdough biscuits and cornbread and blackberry cobbler and banana splits...

i wonder if it'll even be warm enough for tornadoes to survive.

blizzardry all through the day. i somehow don't feel up to tobogganing..

stay inside and fall asleep with stacks of books on your chest. dream something like james & the giant peach. talcum and badgers and blood and angels fly through the air. at last: a cool hand between the sleeping shoulders.

my telephone rang somewhere around five o'clock. it was still light outside. i was in bed reading, and i don't remember why i got out to answer it. sense of adventure. telling someone you do not, thank you anyway, want a subscription to the star tribune always a great adventure. it was actually some old co-worker from borders. three minutes into the call he asked if i'd been smoking pot. he said i was even more inarticulate than he'd remembered. otherwise the call didn't seem to have any particular purpose.. except maybe to make me hungry; he said he lived within walking distance of the whole foods market, who makes loaves of yummy sourdough pecan raisin bread and always has cherries, even in january. i still have pits in my coat pockets from the last time i went there. i STEAL cherries from them. grapes too, haha! um. i did play my saw for him a bit, and he suggested it made a nice replacement for the voice. i agree. i'm still hungry.

- - -

march 11.

the clarinet unraveled a goose-story.

after work i went to a music thing my accordion teacher had told me about. it was very good. violins help me see all sorts of stories and adventures in my mind.

during intermission i came up with a way to include the didgeridoo in my marching band.

after the show i had ubersammich and french fries and pineapple juice!

for a while i was not sure what to do on my spring break. it is this month. i've decided to journey across the prairie looking for tornadoes. i'm taking my saw and my bicycle. we shall be travelling as the world-famous mulching band, badger has doubts, and you can find our tour dates here if you would like to come see us play.

i dream of a particular sort of peanut butter. unconscious attempt to polish blackbirds.

woke up nauseous with feeling of EARACHES. reluctant to go to work. horrible sense of time carrying me forward. always accompanied by this idea of blood spouting from the ears. i miss what sundays might've meant in the past.. feeling of belonging in a certain day, like waking up and making blackberry pancakes, and staring out the window from my rocking chair. later in the day i'd like to go hop around in a big field or something. just to stand in a place and not have to see anything.. or be seen by anyone. sometimes i think i really should go live in milledgeville. in that house there is a spoon rack i made for my grandma shaped and painted like a goose in a top hat... my dad let me use his jigsaw blade for that. more exciting than anything i've done in the past ten years.

- - -

march 9.

..we joined hands and flew upwards like a scroll of snow.

insurmountable distance between bed and window. this dark freezing room you can taste through your skin.

describe the aftermath in the form of a cookie recipe. i remember the dream, the bedroom. i remember worms hobbling behind my broken window. i remember pancakes, and ice cream. they had bright tears in their eyes like minnows...

four years before yesterday. last time i was really happy. i’m talking about a genuineness of feeling. now sleepdrunken. now headaching. there is a dimness to everything that happened after that.

in bottles, in birdfeeders. in the warm breath of a whisper in a song on a record. you move like morning through the stooks. you stopped loving me altogether.

i am lucky to live on the prairie. the flowers are under the snow. i freeze and i feel nothing.

i’d like to cry. it comes close sometimes. i can feel its breath on me when the wet cords are being drawn around my neck. there were certain lines in certain songs that did this to me. certain parts of certain movies when wolves and girls must say goodbye to each other.

yesterday, a photo from an article about mad cow disease where the animals are dead and their big, gentle heads are smeared with blood and their brains are on the table.

tonight, a half-heard conversation in another room while i am reading charlie and the great glass elevator. a woman describes the last moments in the life of a 19 year old cat whose name was benjamin. he’s curled up on my coat there, turning over like a boat so i’ll touch his stomach. he’s white and grey; his upflung paws. hallucination but heartwrenching nonetheless.

i say come for the week
you can sleep in my bed
and pass through my life like a dream through my head
it will be easy
i will make it easy

- - -

march 7.

i live in the wrong part of town to be hungry after ten o'clock.

so i sit, drawing polar oxen with tears in my eyes. only the music, it is only the.. bountiful fur, and feathered hooves. they cast a shadow beside my bed. they cast a shadow until the pen runs out of ink.

there are wheels and dust and rings,
wool and whiskers,
there are flying children
(of which i was one).
there is that life of waiting for snow.
there is that silence.

so i sang to the animals. so i said i've got a blizzard in each fucking wrist.

friends are not a cure for loneliness

better get some hydrogen peroxide.

The kittens turn to me for help, paws outstretched, eyes beseeching. I save them from the danger, despite my degenerative illness and other sundry obstacles. A local radio station interviews me, but takes my quotes out of context.

started two month's worth of accumulated schoolwork this morning. still too cold to ride my bike. i have a hankering to see bedknobs & broomsticks again.

- - -

march 6.

why never before. a feeling as though your neck were broken. if only i had a kite.

something new and old about tuesdays. keeping above "borderline" states and wading home from school, tracery of branches in the dark puddles. mood still thick and surly. heard someone say "existentialism is one of those words that no one knows the meaning of but they use it anyway because it sounds pretty," and wanted to tell her she was an idiot.

- - -

march 5.

i obviously need a weathervane.

in bed last night reading with a candle balanced on my chest. i’d always thought this was a good idea. invariably i fall asleep while reading in bed. bed is one of those places that just seems to be waiting to go up in flames.

the melty parts round the rim of the candle making shadows on the pages that look like houses and dark hills. somewhere around 11:30 i blow out the flame and fall asleep and dream of the place. hen comes too; we run, run until we’re both lost. no longer feeling i have to explain myself.

once I had nostalgia wash me out to sea like a tide
I yelled in the shadow of some ship
the past is lost
it has gone off course
it is a pilotless vessel
hour by hour I lose another to the past
I am losing time
now there are trains and time is like a half buried girl

- - -

march 4.

the delicate brain which had treated them to such quaint thoughts was now gone. having been otterly rollicked in a heavy syrup.

it occurred to me tonight to move to south dakota. i've made up something in my mind about them having vegan strawberry shortcake there.

the temperature of ghosts causes all candles lit in my room to flicker incessantly. i lie in bed and the way the light is on the walls is like being in a room with a projector going. i try to imagine the movie that might be on the reel but it's usually just this white horse wandering around a city or on a beach or something.

i don't think i have much talent for being alive.

- - -

march 3.

nice night riding. no one else out at the barn. tonight there was a record player in the ring, so i got to play things we lost in the fire while i hacked around. that was nice. haven't gotten to ride to music in three years. did dressage in washington and never listened to anything but pisces iscariot then.

went to a wedding today. realized briefly that all those people hate me. i don't know why this still makes me sad. maybe it doesn't. maybe it just makes me wish i was completely unknown.

at one point a girl there said, "oh, I've been meaning to tell you.. I work with someone who knows you."

"that's impossible," i said, "no one knows me."

turned out to be somebody i used to work with at borders. somebody who was my chum for a bit... chums in the sense that we chased each other around with puppets instead of selling books... in the end he thought i was in love with him or something, ostensibly, i'm guessing, because i put a quote from "the trick is to keep breathing" in my last maggy. a character in that book happened to have the same name as him. i tend to be more in love with characters in books than with people i know in real life. he told me he was moving to iowa. he wasn't. his wife wanted my guts spilled.

la la la

in happier news, porridge's mascot got his photo taken today. he's going to be world famous.

staring out the window this morning with a toothbrush in my mouth. no trace of inspiration. listening to bright eyes with no expression on my face. feeling of being able to hear beneath the music as if it wasn't even there.

somewhere between 6 and 7 i dream of being on the prairie in the middle of a blizzard. no sense of cold or danger, but i can smell the odor of death in the snow winds. like night of approaching chicken factory in the deep mush. here it is dawn, or evening; at a distance i see wolves with enormous urine-colored crocodile eyes. in dreams i have never felt threatened or pursued by an animal, but here i fly away from them. disturbed by how i could see their eyes fields away.. and how they appeared not to move or see anything. i ascend effortlessly into a sky tangible with tightly bunched stormclouds.

a bit later i'm trying to meet up with people from my ar group to work on some writing. i'm hours late, but when i get there (to the library), only one other person has shown up. i go back outside and watch the others gradually arrive, but make no attempt to join them. someone from elf power is sitting at their table. in a place like an ampitheater, we walk up and down the steps without acknowledging each other. i try to take flight, this time with much difficulty, and nearly collide with a low-flying airplane. really a jet. it's gigantic. more fearful of this than anything i've encountered dreaming in years.

when i wake up, i hear a crow outside and think it is the voice of my mother. it startles my heart.

- - -

march 2.

this winter was all i had left. now even the snow is dying.

just called waste stupid for disconnecting me. i'll probably get thrown off the cookie and pie team.

- - -

march 1.

lately i've been wishing i had one desire
something that would make me never want another
something that would make it so that nothing matters
all would be clear then
but i guess i'll have to settle for a for a few brief moments
and watch all dissolve into a single second
and try to write it down into a perfect sonnet
or one foolish line

reindeer antlers grew up between us.

i think i've emptied enough almond breeze cartons to build a raft and float away.

- - -

february
january
& december
& norris & the dreaded biscuits