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Saturday, March 24, 2012

The last few days

get your ass kicked by ocean. get beat, get born. glide on the surfboard with torn up toes. pay later, thrive now. hike to class with a horrible limp and salt-water hair.

go to the cemetary, maze of mausoleums tombs and small wood crosses. if you have enough money you can buy yourself legacy, your name carved into marble, your bones encased. if you don't, you'll be wiped away by time--your cross will crumble, your remnants erased. watch out, you explorers, it's dangerous: vagabonds and looters and torn souls haunt this place

Stay out of the hospital if you can. If you must go, buy a pastry from the woman with the giant tupperware of baked goods, she circulates the waiting room. It will make you feel better, maybe, mostly because it's caked in powdered sugar.
Don't take the elevator, the one with broken, illegible buttons, the one that threatens to break beneath the weight of bad news--the stress scribbled madly along it's peeling walls.

Celebrate Friday again, celebrate because all your bones are intact. Go to Valpo sit in Cerro ConcepciĆ³n with good people and a couple 40s below a purple sky, trace the curve of her illuminated hills with your finger--they look like frozen, electric waves, or a piece of God's Light-Brite art. Fight off the fear that's been planted in you by surrounding yourself with strength. Eventually approaching silhouettes cease to be potential threats, and melt into possible companions--we're not the only ones out to soak the night in. With wonder in our eyes, we stare down at the spiraling night city. Mangled Spanish sounds better with every swig I promise.

Kings and queens of the sand dunes, hurdle ourselves as far as we'll fly, always wanted to fall without fear. Miss the desert like a mother, first time I ever saw myself was in her canyons. But I'm not there: I'm here by the coast, where I'm supposed to be.

Friday, March 16, 2012

First Impressions

soo i'm all sorts of lazy, and this aint finished but here it's for you


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First Impressions
(The Dare)


Will I get lost at sea? Inevitably: I’m just trying to be more than a queen of debris--
Here atop waves do I beckon the universe to disturb me.
Don’t got my sea legs so I quiver with every lurch of the earth, staring down the spines of winding streets
where aerosol women watch from walls as the day crumbles to a break,
and smokestack lightening boys (ohso addicted to those Lucky Strikes!)
only vanish when you blink—
Fight off death and fear with a discotheque and a couple beers,
Track down life—it sounds like untameable laughter
or wanderers in the middle of the night—cachai?
Listen:
On certain nights the marina speaks
with the rusting sonata spun from melodies of open sea,
and nightmares of being trapped at port—
damned to merely watch the world spin off,
And many nights the street dogs howl
and they don’t know why or what they’re looking for.
Watch:
Look for me in the window of speeding busses,
I don’t know where they’re taking me,
never take the same route cause I’m afraid to find my footsteps,
just trying to trust the pulse of people who know her best,
I’m still timid, too soft to track her down, but fija:
Women like myself fall prey to solar flares and full moons—
this place took a bite of me when I had let my guard down.
Now I’m just trying to return the favor
Plan on breaking you down, painted impatient electric aggressive—
you hate people like me who tread too softly,
always preferred the threat of earthquakes.
Oh crazy city so colorful, so rabid and starving,
Mother of shipwrecks and father of blind men with insatiable hands.
I am here and you will take me.

Sunday, March 4, 2012

Follow the girl through sandstorms. If you lose her, look for the glint of her porcelain skin beneath sunlight. Follow her up winding streets that lead to the edge of town, where the ocean shines like pulsing glass: hold your breath or the city will steal it. Follow the girl to the beach, and watch the silhouettes of children dancing against the dying sun. Drink in twilight, dream of all the sailors past your horizon, the ones who do not think of you when their eyes are closed. We are crepuscular creatures and we aren’t ashamed, pouring back glasses of red wine beneath moonlight and coming to life as the distant city lights grow. Sit with bare feet buried in the sand with the girl and a French Dharma bum. We’ve always demanded too much. But not now. Now, we want just this.

White Space

Arguably, a story is a story when it has tension, or plot. Inevitably In prose, it’s me who gets to decide if the story is the span of the day, week, or year. But in the story of my life, I don’t have complete control over the pulse of tension—-how long it will take for tension to escalate, to decrease. I can frame any anecdote into a story with tension for you, but that’s pure craft. That was purely for you, the reader. In reality, there are days and weeks, where I will perceive there to be tension and no tension and the days which I perceive to be a lack of tension, those days disappear into dust when I look back on them.
You know, like in a novel the narrator can say: “One week later…”
But I don't welcome that. In fact, I think that's what scares me the most--that white space. I don't want white space in my story, I want tension.

We