hi this is a short story hey!

These words hold what is and disregard what could not be. Over a kitchen table, all that is irrelevant becomes displaced, like dust in the cosmos—some background image that can never truly be seen. It is 8 AM. The scent of sleep mingles with hazelnut coffee. The silence yields to the clatter of awakening. Something is expanding, something is. At 8 AM, there exists only what is.

Three rings are laid out on the kitchen table. Danielle picks them up, one by one, and slides them onto their respective fingers. The sky has been blue for hours now, but a storm is coming. Even in the center of the city she can smell the leaves turning, exposing a different green to the clouds.

To be so small is a blessing. When you are so tiny in the world, every drip of coffee (hazelnut) is just yours. The singularity of your insignificance is so gigantic that words can barely hold on. But Danielle is slipping rings on her fingers in the kitchen and there is the sky now hovering only inches over the building and oh!

Everything just is. It is so simultaneously satisfying and accusatory. After these few minutes of Biblical peace, the desires begin to filter in with the new storm. But who will fault you for your good intentions? Clutching the coffee, the halos steams cleansing knuckles, a thin elixir. Who could confront you for merely wanting an easier or less guilt-stricken life?

As you sit on your bed and lose the simple clarity of only 10 minutes earlier could you even begin to guess the language that would spill from you further to your future? The stunning night will fall. It will.

Preparation for the day can also occur in that time where everything is again. The muting of all else under a veil of consideration for the perpetual sleepers. Subsisting. Stark. Gentle.

Who will fault you for your good intentions? There will always be things that you must accomplish. It will never be enough in those few moments of sky and harmony in the universe to just be along with all else. There is movement in the coming storm. It aims to take you with it.

It is important to be just. If you cannot be just, be arbitrary.
If you cannot be just, be arbitrary.
If you cannot be, be.

It is still 8 AM in New York; a storm will hit today; someone is asleep. The three rings are steady and silver. Danielle’s eyes reflect the glow of inconsequential news on a laptop. They glimmer like stars, moving further away with the expansion of the universe.

I, the prodigal roommate, eclipse half the window with my rising.

Oseberg Ship

Your inscrutable face, dishes of ash
lain on a bedside for thousands of hours
following the knotted sheets down
the fire escape. Lakeside river meets sand
at a romantic belt buckle overturning
the ends of conversations to find bugs,
little bugs to crawl underneath fingernails.
Good to remain tiny, good to pull out
infestations, good to roll up the fields
and smoke them into bits and pieces. Yes,
your festering body, vulgar slang’d
the rest of the night, regardless of every
landscape mentioned or rebuked, but I
kept my arms in good time, and carried it
all away like an eventual Viking. Down
to the water we slept darkly. Across rivers
there were more anthills lovingly
thoroughly appropriating each morsel, arthritic
but watching.

Similarly I have sat bedside stricken
with the joys of being intransitive, coming
down off a sky so blotched, I could not
overcome the easiest means of thinking.
Heels scraped in the center of a murky
park folding a membrane found previously
to a something they might if you
really believe you have nothing. Venom
puddles in elbows brown good to be close
enough to your face, heaving stones over
and over the river, cornering the new
insects on islands we can hardly touch,
can hardly tie down. The too-religious
praying mantis. The orbiting scorpion.
Yes, with a cinched moment I see again
pretty daisies on a shoulder, a following
guttural oh no. Given I have not remembered
taken I can’t care take off this shiny
metal buggy you little moth you tiny cockroach,
I have not remembered the last inch of
shore to the rivers on fire.

Mostly Drunk Musings

3/19

Church bells don't alert anyone to anything important, except for the time. Six o'clock. Let's settle down now for an evening's worth of the same. Familiarity, to some extent, is evil. Moderation as well. The stepping & stopping of standing around, staring in the sun. Here, the bells last. Everything tiny is significant. Even the sun is personal. The same radio stations play the same songs but the stereo is never reprimanded for such an act. Nor is it turned off. Things are replaced when they fall apart, and only then. Don't ask "What are you doing?" - you already know. Welcome home.

3/23

It is important that every is as close to intentional as possible.

"Someone will stay with you until you are well enough to be on your way, or you are in good hands. You will not be left alone."
-Subway advert re: sick on the subway

3/27 - politely inebriated in greenpoint.

Je n'ai pas du probleme mais ou est ma vie?
Where is my life? Is this really what I have become? Polski Bridge sitter, drunk as usual. Why can't I ever leave my body the way I want to? There you are again, Empire State Everything. Is this really where I will live and die? I'm stuck in English again, I'm a slave to my native tongue and it's Too Bad. Give me something harder--let's get me out of my body, do it for real this time, I need to think down a seperate stream of consciousness. Why am I stuck inside when everything real is outward. Acknowledge that what has happened is the truth & the full truth. This is nothing but real. Yes this is the past but it is only a fraction of the future

remembering & forgetting constantly