The death of a moon cowboy

Rotorua

2011-10-19T10:35:00.000-07:00

In honor of our impending trip back to New Zealand tomorrow!, I wanted to post my Rotorua poem from last year's trip. I orginally envisioned writing a series of New Zealand poems--one for each day--and I still may do just that.

--- ---

The smell of sulfur lingers in my shirts,
wrapping these cotton threads in an
otherworldly musk that can't be machine washed,
that has to be worn
and eroded molecule by molecule

until the scent itself is just a memory of it,
fragmented and partial,
lumped in with other thin stretches of lake highway
and stream shrouded mudpits,
mobbed bus depots and
creek waterfalls like fire flowing on the outskirts of town,

and the bedsheets and white walls on Hinemoa Street
are infused with the same smell in the air
that swirls unseen over us and into our
lungs like bellows at the fire,
pumping and prevailing
some minute portion of that acrid substance
to mix through my swirling blood,

and then I am it and it me, a more
complete and more ruined creature:
part mineral, part man.

Sego

2011-06-06T17:39:00.000-07:00

I finally have posted my next poem. Long wait. About the ghost town of Sego in the Book Cliffs.

--- ---

Bones of old coal-surveyors
buried somewhere--everywhere--
under deer-trampled sage
and rickety leaning piles of roof timbers
eroding thin like coffin lids.
These are perched
over fallen tin and concrete foundation,
the rumpled stuff of hollowed financial dreams.

Sandstone brick stacked and crumbling,
a soaring facade
slowly removing itself
deep into morning's light.
The bank saferoom bored underground
once black and secret, now
scorched and sun-opened.

Cottonwood leaves
rustle the night a convincing waterfall echo--
though the wetsand trickle in the wash
indicates otherwise.
These burnt-orange frames of hundred-year
cars mind the weather well, rust in place here
against wind, snow, bullets.

Long before we struggled around this way
these cars made it up here.
Everything makes it here eventually,
wind through the ghosted desert.

..................[the southwest]

- New Mexico in October

- Sego

New Mexico in October

2011-01-13T03:45:00.000-08:00

I'm going to write a series of poems representing our 10-day trip through New Mexico and the southwest in October 2010. I want to accompany them with photographs. This represents an overlook, my feelings of coming off and out of that land.

--- ---

There was yucca everywhere,
and sagebrush and rabbitbrush
and prickly pear and cholla.
Huge thunderheads painting it all
gray and wet.
Endless skylines, interrupting mountain
ranges, sand and hot springs and caves.
Camping just about anywhere.
I've got a shining new buckle
inlaid with black and turquoise, inscribed with the state's name and an eagle--
a parting birthday gift
out on those white dunes.

Now I'm 31
and home again for a little while.

..................[the southwest]

-- New Mexico in October

-- Sego

Indetermination by railroad

2010-09-09T14:05:00.000-07:00

I walk the railroad ties,
thick metal tracks bloodstained with rust
and rammed flush with spikes decades ago.
The stubby thistles slide their spines
into my bare toes regardless.

The rain starts,
drops the size of fists.
The specked asphalt expands until glossed
dark and drowning.
I need to pick up an old car from
some scruffy mechanics.

But I'd rather walk the tracks--
a Stand By Me moment--even
though the rest of it is city,
even though the rest is crowned by
rainspattered black-windowed buildings
and slick cars making fountains
behind them in the shiny streets
until the August heat sucks back up
its two inches of rain into those
selfsame clouds.

I want to follow these plotted railroads.
A cargo bum with slivers in his toes
from the shredded pine ties
that began coming apart slowly long ago,
polished locomotive steel propelled greedily across.

But it just leads back to the city.

I cross the five-lane road
and rush inside out of the rain
to pick up the key to my beaten car.

The city's own silence

2010-08-25T19:10:00.000-07:00

I stole out from the club and it was snowing
a wet snow like rain,
sifting down it spat my cheeks and didn't stick,
went right through to the skin,
made wetter my shirt and
dampened the smell of smoke.

Walking I watched the halfbright
streetlamps lighting
the weak February blizzard--
the cineplex neon
hummed and the power station hummed
and a bum with his back leaned soaked
against old walls asked for change.

The white 1910 brickwork of Redman Records,
shiny and wet under stone-carved Indian busts
like it was painted yesterday,
streaks of nonsense graffiti blackened
by its rusted entrance gate.

A raingutter poured and splashed a river
ephemeral, a small misplaced waterfall
next to a taxi waiting muted,
blinker flashing soundless streaks.

Some barren dripping winter trees, small
and landscaped accordingly.
The empty lot only mud now (and above it
the storage building I explored once when it was empty:
all puddles and exposed steel beams,
black stairwells leading to beds of the homeless).

Over wet staggered blocks of sidewalk
I sloshed and felt it rough on my toes,
I thought of lying across a wet parkbench
here in this sleepy dark, looking up to the
rushing endless flakes and
counting myself among them,
just one thing in a volley of uncountable things,
drifting over Salt Lake City and
its mudded walkways, shouldered buildings,
shoestring tenements,
haphazard midnight dreams--

I walked alone on the vacant streets
and supposed the ringing in my ears
was the city's own silence.

--- ---

In February of this year I saw Cursive and Alkaline Trio at In the Venue in Salt Lake. I came out to this snow, and I fumbled around in it and wanted to remain in it a while, and instead got into my car as it warmed and jotted some things in my journal.

Long ago drive

2010-06-16T22:31:00.000-07:00

Once I drove seven hundred miles
across the pocked face of Nevada
having slept one hour in two nights.
My mind wandered and I sang and swerved,
drifting off--
the mirrored brine pools along I-15
reflected splintery fenceposts and
halfcircle culverts,
this lone pickup truck sailing like a swan
over a translucent asphalt lake.
All of it a vision, swirling and hazed,
the open road and the shoulder and the median
and some direction, some driving westward;
I don't remember much of it.
I'm lucky I survived.
That salted and mountained landscape,
reeling me in over its sagebrush and juniper
in a dream,
with some semblance of destination.

--- ---

Just some thoughts and reflections on the craziest long drive I've ever done, Provo to Placerville when I had only slept one hour in the last two nights. I was asleep before I passed the Kennecott smokestack.

Even winter

2010-05-24T18:43:00.000-07:00

Waning sunlight clings to the mountaintops
like a snow of red cinders from a dying campfire.
It sets behind West Mountain and Utah Lake,
a glimmering pool of reflected magma spreads
in tendrils weaker and weaker
then snuffs out
in a crepuscular hurry.

Grey the sky fades, dead and ashen
in the brief moments of nautical dusk.
Horizon flat and blackblotted from view,
our spherical world
wrapping us,
blinding us.

The stars like myopic wildlife
stare inward at us.
They stare through us.

That daylit din settles and calms, and
excepting the roars of the omnipresent diesels
and nighttrains, our valleyed little city
shutters its windows, succumbs to sleep.

The dull empty glow of the
tabernacle makes blacklimbed tree figures
and the pale moon rises quiet
over dark foresttops.

tabernacle at dark

a mountain moonrise

--- ---

This morning brought a lovely little springtime reminder that winter wasn't so long ago. The heavy snow and flooded gutters and lawns made me want to post this poem that I wrote over different days and while seeing different scenes during winter months.

Life moves in a current

2010-04-05T14:52:00.000-07:00

First night in a different house.
The first out of another:
an old nourishing home that was always too cramped,
that we found a hindrance and complained about.
Still we decorated it gently,
draped lights and colorful tapestries about,
placed ornaments of our conquests and interests.
We loved in it and danced around
our humble space as if it were really our own.
We memorized its many creaks and mistakes
because they too were ours.
A natural extension of each of us, this home.

My wife gave birth in that small living room,
her beautiful butterfly legs familiar yet foreign.
Like a goddess perfect and strong and courageous
she sweated into the lukewarm
water and life embodied rose unscathed--
strange, remarkable life
to breathe our world's uncertain air.

Early spring and we watched in earnest for
blossoms on the hollowing apricot tree,
and Jarom ruined his arm climbing the ladder to pick them.
Sucking endlessly at their pale orange nectar and
crowding them in cardboard boxes and grocery bags.
The house faced south and had character but was still
ugly, dirtied once-white siding edged with metal and broken,
exposing brownblack underside
like a dark secret that everyone knows anyway.
But a rainbow of tulips nudged
through the soil and the grass greened
and was ringed by rosebushes and lilac,
so much beauty,
so much color and life in a new land:
a sacred place to us.

It was easy to leave, to gather
armfuls and boxed labeled belongings and slowly
fill different rooms.
Piles dwindled and we dusted
and vacuumed until floors gleamed and brightened and
cobwebs were finally removed then we turned out
all the lights and checked each room
and locked the doors and drove elsewhere.
A routine operation, clockwork.

But when we happen by once and once again
the haunting spirit of that place
fills us and memories burn again so molten,
reinforcing pathways, etching moments on us
like tattoos or windborne sand stinging your eyes.
These are magic things reborn
(as by the same crouched mother in a blowup pool in that room
when the seasons changed some time ago),
and like everything these too will fade, accidentally--
but our hearts and hands and the deepdown places in our minds
know better.

I'm sorry we left you, but
life moves as in a current
and things change that way too.
Yes you, our trembling house of strife and joy, you
will someday crumble or lie bulldozed but each
of our living memories there
will be recorded and remembered somewhere,
or by someone, because
nothing really ever leaves.
Although it often seems that way.

Now, here, I look around at these cold wooden floors,
the secret downward stairwell and pale
impersonal walls, the long backyard with
winter's shriveled grass stretched all across like dead skin,
the different smells everywhere,
the echoing hardness of this new unbroken place
and I smile
and look to the naked ceiling,
wondering will anything else change.

--- ---

I'm sentimental, it's true. We just moved out of our house of the last four years. It was a little rental house that needed lots of love--and we gave it. Now four years might not seem long to some, but it is. It's a substantial amount of time. One-seventh of my life. We only had two kids when we moved in; now we have three. I turned 30 there. Big things occurred, lots of life involved. We miss that house, but it will always be special. And we love our new home already.

Retirement

2010-03-24T17:28:00.000-07:00

Still half asleep, opened eyes barely;
woke at two, three, four and so on.
Packed snowdrifts stream by in subfreezing weather.
Fogged eyes and rear windows.
The motor hums and warms and
spit little bolts of fire inside like
fresh sunburts propelling a new day,
a new tired string of hours,
some chorus of immaterial voices fixed
like ornaments in a Christmas tree--
seasonal and fleeting we hope.
So static and typical--these displaced
priceless things that glitter and gleam
where we've set them, waiting to
be appraised by a future which may never arrive.
We wait for a decisive indicator
that our choices have been good and correct,
that we're working and will work
hard like those tireless spark plugs
until the day our job is done, engine retired
or dead
or maybe a moment sooner.

--- ---

A random poem I wrote in January regarding work and working, routine and monotony. The way things like this in life ebb and flow.

Snow on your day

2010-03-13T15:03:00.000-08:00

On your day it's snowing,
wet and pale like your first moment,
all wide-mouthed and noise and glistening
new life.
So small, your tottering form
has never been enough to contain
all that spirit and raucous laughing
innocent joy.
It's more than a little paradoxical.
Except smallness you will outgrow,
and still you'll enliven me,
quicken my purpose and intentions,
and it's surely a wonder
how you smile
your three-year even-toothed grin that
hasn't stopped
since you first looked up
those opal eyes into mine.

--- ---

Happy Birthday Orion. You inspire me.

Found

2010-03-09T13:57:00.000-08:00

My little girl, while dreaming last night
I saw your Baby Kitty
sitting collapsed and formless,
mostly black now from exhaust and dust and bits of asphalt,
black plastic eyes still shiny and intent
as if she has been waiting--
That day, inch by inch we searched the meridian in vain
and finally pulled back out into heavy traffic,
you in disbelief that after all these years
and second chances she was gone,
your eyes were full, mouth set and angry,
and the white dashed lines on the interstate flicked by
as you thought about putting
your hand out the window and letting go,
and saying goodbye.

--- ---

I wrote this last October, after dreaming about Bella's stuffed Baby Kitty, the one she had for five years, lost and found numerous times, across state lines and in movie theaters, always resurfacing. She loved her so much, and one day we drove north on the I-15 and Bella held her out the window and let go. It was accidental. We went back and searched and never found her.

The west valley

2010-03-04T20:29:00.000-08:00

Watched an airliner cut through fog
over the west valley.
Children play nextdoor
near the parking lot,
shrieking in their
loose-fitting uniforms, ties untightened and
rolledup unbuttoned sleeves.
They jump about their small asphalt schoolyard,
cold chainlink fences enclosing
squat brick buildings.

The bald youth at the front desk
buzzes me in, and I wait and then make
my way to geometrically set chairs
and halfwalls in a back corner.
I sit and stare, speaking acronyms
and cryptic jargon, proving my worth first
with words alone.

Midday, past the parking lot children roam
the broken sidewalks,
clutching their stacked books and hunched over,
edging to and from this industrial-block private school
through mixed-zoning--
the Latino market complex and 7-11,
rows of dilapidated apartments, their
rotted front lawns littered with faded plastic toys.
We park near an old factory and eat Thai.

The mixed blazes of
neon brakes and blinding headlights mingle
like stars twinkling through the atmosphere,
like twin lanes of peppermint red-on-white
or a barbershop pole churning
in endless monotony,
screaming racetrack traffic across the freeway--
is it such an enabling way of freedom,
wandering us home
under a foggedover full moon at night?
We clutch our notepads and thin computers,
ready to close another hazy day of
the same frantic, purposed nonsense.

--- ---

I recently started working up in West Valley City, a long drive, a true commute, next to the airport and its continuous takeoffs and landings, in areas and neighborhoods once completely foreign. There are many ordinary and strange things that transpire--it's just life; they're just kids and people going about their daily routines.

wyoming pictures

2009-11-19T09:16:00.000-08:00

I recently put up our photos from our Wyoming trip in July this year. Some of my favorites are below. Check out my photostream or the photoset.

Wind

2009-08-04T10:35:00.000-07:00

I can hardly make out the stars,
melted away by the vaporous streetlight haze.
Machinery pounds and pummels somewhere distant,
repetitive, like garbage trucks emptying overflowing
dumpsters again and again.

The train hoots and calls, parades down the old tracks
like some giant steel owl
gliding through the night,
under bridges paralleling the industrial blocks,
past the lake--stealth, honing in like a bat.

Black branches rustle, blown into small
battles with each other. The wind silently
winds through blades of grass, it
sails over the innumerable lookalike rooftops
and rattles roadsigns.
It pushes at my back, soars into my mouth
and eyes;

it rushes into my veins and carries me,
lifting me high over the speckled city--
all pretentious and illuminated like a great
connect-the-dots below.
I look above me
and I can see the stars.

--- ---

I wrote this a while ago, 2009-03-26.

amy, above the wind

Simpson Springs

2009-07-29T14:17:00.000-07:00

The dead predawn has snuffed out all life,
all sound,
the centurial dirt road torn into the
desert below is littered with a thousand
hoofprints, trampled and endless and eroded,
a shrine to an age and an instinct
from which we're far removed--which we
ourselves removed and polished and placed shardlike
in houses and museums, books and display cases.
Memories so sharp and honed they draw blood.

Slept with the tips of Cassiopeia's W facing left;
woke and she was right. Slept and
watched the world rotate round on the north star
like spinning a plastic globe;
woke and watched the liquid midnight velvet drain
the sky, disappearing stars hidden only by glare,
Capella the last to exit.

The desert slowly steadily stirs,
no memory, just now,
just a robe of filtered sunlight capping
eastward hills and highlighting butte and rock
and military runway.

The wooden walls of the restored station creak and shake in
the heat of the morning sun. The real ruins tell
their own story with crumbling stone and foundation--
tell of death in place of birth, abandonment and
decay, a man left a widower in a harsh world
when life was more fragile, more visceral--
the liminal space between the dead and living thin
and vulnerable.

We put our hands into the old old dirt,
finger the coarse bits of gravel weathering
from the slight hillside.
Our pores are pockets for the windblown dust,
red and pale and dun, flown in from the brine
left by ancient Lake Bonneville--its salt,
the earth's salt, mixing with our salted skins,
marking us, painting us all as one, a
living mineral touched by and breathing each
element. Mutual symbiotes, products of one another.

We have always been dependent
on these stars, this dirt, these trampled roads.
The orange lights of Dugway may shine at midnight,
the desert may erupt and the earth tremble as the
army tests ballistics during midday,
but nothing has changed.
We are still here, still the same;
like cells crawling a continuous membrane
we are minute and indistinct
yet one and the same.

The sunlight breaks the hills and heats stone and sand
and throws our shadows long like darts cast
across the plane of the world, and our cracked
lips curve and turn upward and bare teeth
and tongue, eyes slit and creased
and noses upturned we breathe and taste the salt,
taste it with every wild heaving breath.

--- ---

sunrise awakening

that road

life among death

--- ---

This was all inspired by or about Simpson Springs, an old Pony Express station out in the west Utah desert where Jarom and I camped last September on our way to the geode beds. There's just something about the desert . . . Written between 20090326 and 20090404.

today

2009-07-05T20:17:00.000-07:00

Today I explored. I stood on top of this small hill over Soldier's Pass in the southeast Lake Mountains. Here's what I saw:

It was really beautiful out there. My complaints: too much trash--people seem not to care about the west desert; it's simply dumped anywhere they can let it go. Also, too many shooting relics: shotgun shells, bullet shells, broken and unbroken clay pigeons. The land is still beautiful. Let us try to keep it that way.

Here's where I witnessed it:

View 2009.07.05 rockhounding, exploring in a larger map

other things I saw today:

the graffiti train

a house for sale

West Mountain lookin good

the Wasatch front from the west side of Utah Lake

Spiders

2009-06-25T16:21:00.000-07:00

Watched him and his children play
on bikes in wet streets--
a father in his twenties,
everything new and achievable.
A wide world and invulnerable.
That's me,
years past and ahead.
Trying to steady every memory
balanced like a baby in my hand
just so I don't forget.

Moments flow past
like rain slicked across oil on those rainy streets,
those hills by the park where I played baseball each year,
where snow hardly fell but when it did we
stood by the woodstove later with soaked jeans
and makeshift sleds, red fingers and hands.

These thoughts crowd my mind,
rising like an insurgence that must be quelled
and filed orderly into cells,
where generations later they can be
recalled skeletal,
like a young boy's remains
finally found in the desert.

Because they hurt they are so filled with love,
and life is swift and unmediating,
and sometimes we're carried up in the immediacy of
it all, every year, then it's just a blurred stream
and all i want is the swallowing hug of a five-year old girl,
all i want is to tousle sunbleached hair
and explain the curiosities of spiders.

--- ---

These thoughts and more occurred to me early a recent morning. When I get less sleep I'm actually more artistically inspired.

Like a flock of dying birds

2009-06-01T15:46:00.000-07:00

The crane obscures the skyline, looming, like
the handle of some blade plunged into the land.
Capital letters blocked out:
C
A
M
C
O
C
O
N
S
T

Its tower rises, beam by straight steel beam, each day
edging out the Wells Fargo and Marriott buildings,
occupying space where oldfashioned street-level stores once stood.

This lattice of rust-colored, slotted metal
coagulates skyward--
a mounting illness, redeemed only
by the wooden walkway bypass below,
draped in ephemeral idealist artwork.

The hook at the crane's end like a
lost shipwreck anchor sways oblivious
in the dead night air,
oblivious to we who walk below, we who'd rather not
look above and stare

except to watch the clouds gathering
over the little city
like a flock of dying birds.

--- ---

How one day a creek became an ocean

2009-04-07T17:16:00.000-07:00

When the sun had hardly broken
and underfoot the dirt was cool,
the tireless echo of water flowing
stole my sleep
(pouring and writhing over travertine,
tearing it apart while building it),
woke me before all
the others. The river brown and thick,
the broken branches gathered in smooth eddies.
At the foaming crest
a barrel cactus and dead prickly pear,
thousands of footprints cast in the sand
next to mine. Centered in the current downstream
a remnant of yesterday's makeshift bridge--
a half-submerged picnic bench, mummified
in cottonwood leaves and stringed with sediment.
A hundred devastating feet of the essence of
the desert, its fury distilled, passionate and
heedless, happy and calm in all its eons of
crafting and molding.
Somewhere a gas stove whispers and lights,
soft voices murmur and bodies stir awake
another day.

--- ---

Watched small, clear Havasu Creek turn into a raging flooded river one day in August last year. I wrote about it while watching Jarom at his tumbling class on March 24th.

See all the Havasupai photos.

before, looking over Havasu Falls from above it

after, the following morning

watching the water run thick

Escalation

2009-03-22T15:40:00.000-07:00

We walked in during dawn,
red rays on red walls, some
sliver of ancient creation--
desert then and now.
Until the layers gave way to white,
seething toward the sky like teeth,
fangs, an unforgiving world painted
in contrasts. The determined
juniper and sage sprout, unquestioning,
humble plants with little to offer but life.
Below the peak, in folds of
fragmented sandstone, are small
potholes and tanks. In one,
the pale belly of an inverted
lizard faces up, still--
if not for the dark of the water its
white underside would appear
part of the rock itself.

--- ---

In early March, we hiked in Snow Canyon. Brandon and I scaled white sandstone on the White Rock Trail, up into wind and butterflies and scant water.

I wrote this (like the last one) on the lift at Sundance in my little notebook, then transcribed to typewriter, then to here.

this is the tank where we found the dead lizard

Above over it

2009-03-20T15:30:00.000-07:00

Aspen and spruce shadows juxtaposed over
torn white, crumpled ice and snow
and geometric lines and curves like so many
jetplane contrails converging.
Denuded branches reach upwards desperately,
suckling sunlight,
oblivious of the SLOW signs and
fenceposts and the rushing, arcing onslaught of bodies.

Soaring silent over it all, supported by
massive green steel columns,
I look down and it all
lies there beneath my dangling feet,
blooming, static and stagnant
yet somehow unfolding below, scenes and layers
in the snow;
I hover quietly
and reach the summit.

--- ---

Many snowy days were spent at Sundance this season, and each time I was inspired to draw, write, or just think. I first wrote this on the lift in my small notebook (which Bella got me for Father's Day last year), then transcribed it on my typewriter, then re-transcribed it here.

The red stain

2009-02-14T09:25:00.000-08:00

On the ankle of an old sock,
faint and red like sandstone dust,
a borrowed climbing shoe left its mark,
its memory, a reminder of that night
in December when it snowed silently,
and we stole some midnight
hours in the closed gym--
lights on, music roaring,
we scaled artificial walls and laughed
and discussed the future and his
impending departure to warmer climes--
a relocation to the western coast,
divided by scales of land and road,
desert and mountain ranges and
straight-on highways that
connect us like
pinpricks of light in a grand global constellation.

--- ---

In late December a good friend of mine moved away. Beforehand we spent some good time together--some of it climbing at The Quarry in Provo. He's an expert climber and showed me a thing or two. One night we climbed alone until 3 am, enjoying each other's company before he moved on to a different part of his life.

And so the new world

2009-02-09T10:22:00.000-08:00

And so the new world
chases balls down the street,
searches the distant sky with manmade probes,
follows small gangs of revolutionaries
cross-country,
cross-globe to other small events--
all of it tiny leaps and plunges in a universal heartbeat
that doesn't seem to matter to anyone,
but over time amounts to all that should matter.

It sews synthetic hammocks and
sleeps during the day,
diurnal life inverted. It
opens its eyes at night and
sees only voices,
synethetic hallucination.

It wears a turban over a yarmulke,
bakes in the sun,
skin black as night and white as daylight,
as varied as its own terrain,
desert and frail rainforest,
tundra and mountain and valley--
lightning synapses firing perfectly
in an imperfect world,
an ellipsoid world
barrelling slowly toward eternity.

And so the new world
finds hope in a new symbol,
a stranded figurehead strapped about with ancient chains,
laden with filled crates,
noosed at the wrist and ankle--
only this silvertongued magician
has the key.

--- ---

A bit of a strange, random poem that came to me quickly. It may seem meaningless on the surface, but it's rife with meaning--at least to me. It was partially inspired by a trip my siblings took to Obama's inauguration toward the end of January. So humor me by letting me post this.

It's ended

2009-01-21T13:00:00.000-08:00

It's ended.
The place has mostly cleared out.
The gutters are slick with ice,
running still like glacier rivers.
A pall of fog enshrouds us
like God's great frozen breath,
bringing us in-doors where
thermostats control our hearts.
We're the warm-blooded.
Couples trickle off the streets,
clopping shoes across sidewalks,
echoes absorbed in the smoked air.
The wooden walkway
astride the new tower lot
is lit, staggered every six feet,
adorned with college student artwork
and empty.

The few cars drive off, and as their
motors die in the distance
the orange lights hum still,
singing their silent song to
everyone and no one at all.

--- ---

The other night I went late to an open mic poetry reading at the slick Pennyroyal Cafe. I arrived thirteen minutes before it ended, ready with poems printed and in my journal. But it was ending early, and I stayed seated. I wrote this in my journal afterwards. I also drew a picture of a chair.

--- ---

an example of some of that college student artwork--this is the first piece that graced the walkway

Wolf moon

2009-01-13T12:52:00.000-08:00

We drifted silently over the hills,
following the dead glare of our headlights.
Sirius and Rigel rotated slowly and swiftly
and the sapphire heavens blazed, lit and soaked
in midnight blue by the full wolf moon.

Sometimes an eastbound car passed us; but no one else
headed west, not in this clear January emptiness,
not through these tired towns and blackened cafes,
abandoned trucks parked on abandoned roads.

Thin layers of icecaked snow coated the distance
over the little summit passes, made it all radiate moonlight
upward, reflective like the quiet rearview mirror.

A long sailing string of light burnt downward, headed west
like us, a fuse firing toward an unknown end.
This common meteor, caused by some unremarkable fragment
of rock, briefly outshined our moon
and illuminated the endless road ahead of us.

--- ---

For Christmas I got a typewriter from Joey and Emily. Joey suggested keeping it in my car so I could be a traveling writer, Jack Kerouac, whenever I wanted to. I took his suggestion. Then on this beautiful January-thaw day I got in my car, rolled the windows down, lugged the old machine like a bulky steel laptop into the front seat with me and began jabbing away at the keys. Just to get anything down, anything at all, because lately I've been less motivated or too busy or whatever and nothing much creative has poured forth from my fingers. So this here's my Wolf moon poem I hammered out, based on our spectacular winter midnight drive across Utah and Idaho and Oregon to Bend for one all-too-brief weekend. The original is cut and pasted in my journal. I retyped it to post here.

Something I thought I saw

2008-10-13T11:11:00.001-07:00

Two people stood alongside
the empty canyon highway,
embracing against the new snow,
frozen there like dead bulrushes,
upright reeds in the mud.
Drifting leaves curled up
like hollowed-out canoes
over the glassy river,
meandering its slow feminine curves.
And they stiffly watched,
apathetic sticks,
clasped together coldly
in the dying sagebrush.

She's perfect

2008-10-10T13:33:00.000-07:00

My wife is perfect. So sweet, so loving. She makes my day every day, and knows how to throw one mean party. She threw me a surprise party last night for my birthday. All the best people and friends were there (except those who live too far distant), and I couldn't stop smiling. She had baked a delicious completely homemade ginger carrot cake, made chocolate cupcakes and had snacks and licorice galore. She knows how I like it.

Amy, I love you. Thanks for making my days perfect.

the party group

Haikus +

2008-10-02T17:03:00.000-07:00

Here are some little haiku and a one-liner that I wrote earlier this year.

--- ---

Plateau
Blooming sun--close, bright--
heats prickly pear and blackbrush,
warms red summer sand.

Fallen Leaf
Wind against my face.
Gnats swarm in fading daylight
through the slatted trees.

Wilderness
Booming, crumbling snow.
Shaking glaciers make thunder
in desolation.

Study
I awoke thirsty
against the arm of the couch
with a flattened book.

Deadline
Summer's sunset lasts
longer than other seasons.
Does it have to end?

Old bridge
Across the long park bridge, its skewed boards glassy with rain.

Strange warriors dream

2008-09-30T10:45:00.000-07:00

[dream, morning of 09302008]

We were downstairs, a filthy empty floor in an abandoned warehouse or factory. We were warriors. I had a steel weapon, long and thin that waved like a whip. We saw our enemies--two of them, male--and we attacked. My companion had a long sword. I swung my whipblade and it cut into one of our enemies. At one point he blocked it and it reversed in my grip, came back and cut into my own hand, nearly severing three fingers. I finally decapitated one of them. After we had defeated both of them, I looked down at my hand. My wound was healing up rather nicely. My body's healing abilities were rapid.

We also had to avoid the michens, small insect-like creatures--almost mechanical--that crawled across the dingy underground floors. If they caught you, they put you into a state of suspension. You turn gray and become immobile. Like looking at a Gorgon/Medusa. We quickly stepped over them and left.

--- ---

So the dream was much longer than that, but that's all I ended up remembering. When I woke up my hand was actually hurting like it was in the dream. I must've been sleeping on it funny or lost circulation or something. I'm sure that the whipblade in the dream was inspired by a tape measure which the kids and I played with the night before. Dreams = reality.

Wolf dream, morning of 20080910

2008-09-10T10:29:00.000-07:00

I was with two other guys on a wide dirt trail, almost like a 4WD road. One of the guys I work with. I don't remember the other. A bedraggled wolf started following us. He was missing patches of gray fur, looked scrawny and hungry. He was gaunt by ferocious-looking. I took out my gun and pointed it at him as he approached us. As if he knew what a gun was and was threatened by it. But I didn't know what to do. The wolf kept coming. Kurt took out his gun, an old six-shooter pistol, and was trying to load it. "I'll take care of it," he was saying. But the gun jammed; he couldn't get it to work. He banged it against his palm.

The wolf snarled and came closer. It lunged at me and I shot it, shot it right in the heart. Dark blood came oozing out immediately, and the bullet slowed the wolf down so I dodged to the right. The wolf became desperate and continued after me. I avoided it and ran to the edge of a hill that sloped downward. We danced, back and forth, he trailing blood and I breathing heavily, trying to keep my distance. We stumbled at the little cliff's edge, and I stepped down on its slope to get away. I looked down at the desert and sagebrush below.

The day after the storm

2008-08-12T11:19:00.000-07:00

Driving a narrow highway
all coated in thick ice,
twinkling under the morning sun
like hundreds of stars.

Then the snowbanks
made soundless white loops
as if viewed from a carousel--
whirled through sunlight
and then shadow, again and
again, like so many days
setting into night.
Halved sunflower seeds
hovered within reach
of our splayed fingers
for a few immortal moments, then

sheetmetal crunched,
quarter panels
splintered,
a shatter of glass sprayed and eclipsed
the pavement stars.
A mosaic
of manufactured
colors spread uneven
across the manufactured ground.

That room

2008-07-22T16:19:00.001-07:00

The door's always cracked open,
the humid swamp cooler air holding it
in stasis,
just enough
to hear the late-night cries
from each of three beds:
Daddy; and, I had a nightmare; and, I'm thirsty.

Sleepdrunk, I push the door
that always creaks twice,
assist reluctantly and leave a stern warning.
See you in the morning.

This isn't my job, my responsibility. My duty.
Not something forced or worth rolling eyes at.
They look up at me, into me,
with full eyes while I'm half-asleep,
half-trudging through fatherhood.

Will I ever remember how heart-shattering
the most minute details were?
The sound of a sneeze, a burbling laugh,
mispronounced words, troublemaking,
anticipation for trivial things.
Will I always be an adult--mature, overseeing?
Will I recognize what I have?

These little personalities, distinct and growing,
small packages of voice and song, smiles,
handmedown shirts and dresses,
sturdy legs and golden skin.

There's not enough love to capture them,
to remember them.
I can't wrap myself around them
tight enough for them to ever know. Or
cover them,
a protective sheath that makes them
mine.
Keeps them tiny and spirited and perfect until they
burst free,
someday.
Because there isn't enough of me
to contain all that is them.

The ballroom

2008-07-10T21:47:00.000-07:00

They climb rockbent ladders,
legs like cottonwood limbs.
Smoke rises up the ashblack rock wall
where ground grain cooks, and
the floor of the kiva is streaked wet,
rust-colored and black with
sweat and charcoal.

Behind the defensive wall,
beneath the jutting sandstone overhang,
their bare feet make weak footprints
in the ancient dust--
some grand dance
in the cool underbelly of the cave.

Balanced precision in all things,
their wide smiles and telling eyes.
Time like a hurricane, seasons
of earth and snow and sun
all back over again,
channeled through the bodies of
people who know better.

Little dried corncobs and shattered
bits of clay bowls.
Smoothed indentations in rock just
handholds for curious fingers.
Gravity takes intricate purposeless
walls and makes skipping stones of them.
Ladder legs lie split and ravaged
among the rockshards.
All hidden and eroding in the emptiness
of the canyon cliffs.

Lonely

2008-05-28T14:57:00.000-07:00

I was idling at the stop sign
when your car blew by,
the same metal-green Honda
with California plates.

But it couldn't have been you;
you left this morning
before the sun was up.

dream, morning of May 28 2008

2008-05-28T10:09:00.000-07:00

In my dream this morning I was on a rocky cliff at the top of a road or trail. I was looking in the distance and saw a strange military training base attached to the side of one of the mountain peaks. It came out horizontally, different layers pushing out further from the wall. Each layer looked like a handle of some sort, like a teakettle handle. So there were these stacked handles coming out from the wall, and all these soldiers doing training, some in air, some on monkey bars, row after row of them. They went in a uniform line, up one handle and down another.

Eventually I was joined by Joey and others, and I told them they had to see this base. But when I tried to show them, I couldn't find it. We walked all around and I kept looking off in the distance, but it was gone.

dream morning of 20080326

2008-05-27T13:47:00.000-07:00

I was on a rafting trip, fell off somehow, apparently near Old Sacramento. I was clothed and with all my stuff in my pockets. I came out near these wooden buildings, and through this strange maze I reached an underground operation, like an old mining operation, by the river. I first saw Mike J, and said hi, then I realized he was with other people I had graduated with--Megan, Bryan P, many many others. I talked to them, and it felt like they were hiding something from me, like something was secret. My first thought was that it was our high school reunion and that I personally had not been invited.

I was swimming in the water with them, while talking to them. I got out and found this office of sorts. The whole place was filthy (it was underground) and made of rotting logs. I saw James T, with his hair dyed lime-green and with heavy eyeliner on. He said he was in charge. While we were talking someone broke something behind him and he yelled at them.

I went back to the raft and found all the other people I had graduated with. [Sadly, I can't remember any of their names now.] I led them through the maze of shops and wooden buildings to the operation so they would believe me. Along the way they got lost in some souvenir shops because they weren't following me very well, and I became frustrated.

Dust

2008-04-25T11:58:00.000-07:00

The shrouded mountain
is speckled with wet white.
To the south, the sun breaks
barely below a pall of stormclouds,
lighting the faroff peaks.

A single raven hovers, flies,
wings taut and light in the wind;
it descends on a power line.
Horses stand swishing tails,
hooves caked with snow and mud.

Shifting patches of blue emerge
above the tumorous black clouds
A lone shock of thunder crumples the air,
telling of lightning too distant to see.

A century ago--two, maybe--
I would have wanted
my ashes spread here.
Over the scrub oak and boxelders, the
shimmering quaking aspens.
Over the scree slopes and layered limestone
and the valley floors below--
dust sweeping up like a sandstorm
into the thunderclouds.

Same

2008-04-25T08:37:00.000-07:00

Then, a decade ago,
I was doing these same things.

The bike was different,
a battered Raleigh road bike,
once-white, salvaged from a
basement junk heap. Its tires
blew out frequently.

The streets were the same--no,
different: fewer people, fewer lights
and less construction. Sections of sidewalk
all askew like shrapnel.

I lived a few blocks away.
A condo they called it (they still do),
though its plain walls and
shag carpet told a different story.

These timeless smells--
they still arise from everywhere, everything--
woodsmoke like late Placerville fall,
laundry detergent like the streets of Mazatlan;
the ripening spring air tastes of mulched leaves
and prepubescent lawns.

Funny how we can end up in these same places,
with so little changed--
really,
even though
that life
has gone, and
a new one
is in its place.

Dream, morning of April 23rd 2008

2008-04-24T14:30:00.000-07:00

I was in a large city, and it was the end of the world. Some revolutionary forces had created a device which would end the world--it was seated in a large enclosed stadium. People were flocking to it. It was a party, an end-of-the-world party. Even the authorities were ushering people in. It was as if they were resigned to the fact that there was no stopping this device, so let's just all come experience it in a nice orderly fashion.

I went in as well, through these large, open doors, past police with nightsticks. Lights were flicking on and off. Music was thumping, the bass pounding against the metal floors and walls like some enormous rave. Debris floated in the black air. People screamed, sobbed and shouted. I saw my friend on the stairs, heading down [he looked just like my old friend Raun from high school]. There were two minutes left until the device was triggered.

"We can stop this," I said to him.

"How?"

I pointed up. He followed me back up the stairs, to a ramp that wound around the inner walls of the stadium.

We ran up the ramp and finally found a short door off to the side. We went in, and found a square stairwell. We ran up and up to reach the top of the building.

[segue into new dream]

At the top of stairs I was alone. The view was open, looking over a pool in an apartment complex. There was a shootout going on. I was one of the outlaws.

I was handed a gunbelt with ammo and at least two pistols. A man filled one of the pistols with dried corn. Another gun used small corn cobs as ammo; when the gun fired it sucked through a portion of the cob and expelled. These weapons were deadly.

I shot at my enemies. I hid in shadows, guns cocked and pointed upward. At one point they drove by me, slowly, in a black SUV. A man in black sunglasses rolled his window down and sneered at me. I pointed my red corn-fed pistol at him, held it there. They drove off. I snuck back into a dark hideout where other outlaws and I swapped stories and stocked up on ammunition and rifles.

My Poetic Idol nomination

2008-04-04T19:47:00.000-07:00

[Sorry if you've seen this posted in multiple places--I'm just really trying to get it out there!]

Some of you may know that in the past I had some success in a poetry competition.

I've been nominated again!

Since my last successes they've changed the way a poem wins. There's no single judge or team of judges doing all the work. Now the whole Artella community votes on twelve finalist poems, and the winners are based on those votes. My poem New/old (There's a Polaroid in everything) is one of those twelve finalists.

I would love it if you would participate in the voting! But don't automatically vote for mine--I want to be fair. If you can, read all twelve poems and vote for the poem you think is the real winner. If that's my poem--why thank you.

First you will need to join the Artella community by creating an account on Artella Cafe. Once you create your account, it will email you a password. When you receive the password, go log in and vote for the winning poem!

If you get a chance, please pass this information along to anyone you know who may be interested and who may have the time to do it. Voting ends May 15, at which time the winner will be chosen. Any voters I can get will help! I think there are currently only 53 total votes (as of today). The winner gets a $200 prize, along with some other stuff! So I'm excited. Please help out in the voting process. Love you all.

--- ---

If you didn't get the embedded links above, here are the links/steps to follow:

(1) Create an account here
(2) Vote for the winning poem here (you'll have to log in first)

Running

2008-04-02T10:36:00.000-07:00

Last night I ran, I ran all of three miles, up past Seven Peaks and the old Heritage Mountain Resort. The resort was all boarded up with plywood over the same doors we entered through only a month ago. It's impenetrable now. I'm glad we got in while we still could. I ran the upper loop of the fancy neighborhood where Seven Peaks Golf Course used to be. The houses are all new and nice, but the neighborhood appears rotting, a shambles. None of the homes have lawns or any vegetation at all really. The front yards are all dirt, mud and chunks of rock. Electrical units sticking out of the earth are broken and wires are frayed. Half of the homes are for sale, with stickers and flyers and number-filled posters taped all over the doors and windows. Some homes have Hummers and nice new trucks in the yards. One house up against the mountain has a black metal fence around a playset and basketball hoops. There's concrete, but no greenery, no yard. The end of the property just swoops down into a seemingly forgotten pit of sandy-brown earth. There's an ATV sitting unused at the edge of the property. Boxes and grocery bags and crushed grapefruit scattered the sidewalks. Weeds and thistles grow recklessly, and mounds of dirt create makeshift driveways up into the sloping foothills. To the west there was a gorgeous view of the sun lazily sinking into strips of grey clouds--this was the only redeeming beauty in the whole area, along with the close proximity to the foot of the mountain.

I ran and looked south at the Wasatch, at Mount Nebo and the snow still covering their tops and patterned down their steep sides like they were drawn in stipple. I looked at the setting sun, at the sky. I looked around at the sleeping Seven Peaks area, all lonely up there, just waiting for summertime and flocks of children and parents and teenagers to enjoy the waves and water, the chlorine and snowcones and slides. At the long-dead resort building, boarded up against vandals--though the property just sits there, wasting and decaying like an old barn, starting its third lifeless decade. It'd be better off a canvas for innocent tagging and graffiti, Harry Potter and Humpty Dumpty jokes and drawings. A cavern for pigeons. A refuge for the homeless. Everything's equally substantial, real and beckoning. It pumps my legs a little bit faster. It's all beautiful, the quiet buildings on the hill, the looming white mountains in the distance, the brilliant, darkening sky.

I left the golf course neighborhood, the sad lofty resort, and Seven Peaks behind me, ran back towards our little home closer to the old town, the real heart of the city.

My legs are still tired and sore.

The valley clean

2008-03-31T09:09:00.000-07:00

I know this spring snow,
wet and thick and clinging
like armor on everything it coats.
The slick roads surprise us--
we've forgotten how to drive in snow.
The moon's a pale, waning smirk,
almost lost among
the floating turmoil in the sky.
The mountains are white as bone,
a landscape of hips and teeth and knuckles.
Low clouds form another range,
the same dead-white color,
spun off where mountain meets valley
like estranged cousins.
A fortress of winter encircles us,
an icy crown tightens over our heads.

By late morning the sky blossoms,
the sun emerges from its cloak
and sweeps
the valley clean.

When I first met your family

2008-03-27T09:43:00.000-07:00

I took the wrong turn, the one
that leads to your grandparents' house.
So I drove through their place
in fear of motion detection,
and made it back around to where your
dirt road branches.
I came out into that circle driveway,
that clearing in the forest
jailed in by pine,
confined by trees and brush on all sides--
except the frame of a house
hovering over a valley to the east.
A strange and perfect place
I couldn't have pictured.

Your family was watching TV
downstairs, the room dark,
lit only by the changing scenes.
They sat scattered on the couches;
we stood there together, alone,
in the blackness by the stairs.
Your parents told me to have you back by eleven.
It was already after nine--
I think you made it safely back inside
by five.

Potential

2008-03-04T22:36:00.000-08:00

The streets are empty
like the pews on Saturday.
My scuffed dress shoes sound
hollow against the parking lot asphalt;
they tick-tock rhythmically,
led by my pendulum legs.

The night's faint snowfall disappeared
when the meek heat of the early-March sun
crested the mountains.
The sky is bright, the wind subtle but piercing;
dead trees awaken quietly,
buds pushing from their bare branches.

Winter lifts from the landscape--
its skirt of snow pulls back,
seductively
revealing naked mountain thighs.

My own mind also thaws--
my dreams and thoughts expand, large and swollen
like hot-air balloons,
rising up and high toward the blooming sun,
to fly forever
or melt and join Icarus.

I step up three concrete steps
into the porchway shadow.
I look over the familiar whitewashed door,
raw metal exposed under large scratches
left by couches or children.
I put my hand to the dull golden doorknob--
cold from the air of the changing season--
and turn.

Snow-shoveling

2008-03-04T22:17:00.000-08:00

I have mixed feelings about shoveling snow.
Sure it clears the walkways and
makes journeying outside
a less obstructed experience.

But it tears apart the plane of snow,
creates rifts where none were intended.
It's like a snowplow barreling down an interstate,
pragmatic and determined.

Plus, when winter warms a little and the
ice layers loosen near the sidewalk edges
(and rakes and buckets emerge from the forgotten lawn),
shoveling sends heaps of soiled cakes of ice
onto the otherwise angelic, egg-white land.

I guess I'd rather just walk through it all--
there's a thrill in making the first imprints in
new snow,
like a butterknife gouging into fresh peanut butter.
I'd rather slip and fall,
rather traipse the mess
into the house.
Instead of shoveling,
I'd rather get my feet wet.

dream last night, 20080229

2008-02-29T16:15:00.000-08:00

I woke up at 2 am with my contacts on. What follows is part of the dream I'd been having. I then woke up again at 6 am with another very vivid dream. I determined to write both dreams down, then and there. I went back to sleep. The second dream has been lost to the vastness of memory, while the first remained in portions.

--- ---

Amy and I were riding these machines--half pogo stick, half hovercraft--through what appeared to be the jungles of the Amazon. The water was blue and clear, the foliage green, almost neon green. We would soar up, then float back down towards the water. We were flying uphill over a little tributary, a noisy stream flowing over rocks. The forest was narrow, squeezing in on both sides. There was hardly room to pogo. [The Amazon really is beautiful--you should go sometime.]

We made it down to a cabin by the edge of the river. There was a man there--our tour guide perhaps. We left our hoverpogo machines and were going to get into a little boat of his. As I was walking to the boat, I saw a large wasp. The wasp landed by my foot. Then there was a loud, incessant buzzing sound. The man said to me, "That wasp stung you." I chose not to believe it, so he pointed it out to me. We both bent over and looked at my foot in the shadows made by our bodies. There was a pink blister forming on the top of my foot, between my first and second toes. We watched as the blister grew.

"We have to get the head out," the man said.

Deep within the blister, you could see the head and antennae of the wasp. The wasp's body lay next to my foot, buzzing loudly.

So that's how the wasp stings, I thought. It takes its head off and stabs it into you, and its body falls and lies there, buzzing loudly, an alarm to notify you of what it's done.

The clouds eclipsed the eclipse

2008-02-21T15:44:00.000-08:00

There was a lunar eclipse on the 21st, slated to be visible to most of the US, including the Utah Valley, where I live. The weather decided not to cooperate, and while much of the rest of America got to witness it, I was left clouded.

--- ---

I wait outside,
watching expectantly;
I curse the weather and
the well-placed streetlamp.

I need just one single, simple
clearing--one open patch of sky
the size of a dime--
for perhaps a minute or two,

then you low, happy clouds
can go about your business,
masquerading as spring rain
over the tailend of winter.

Last night I was lost at sea

2008-02-11T11:51:00.000-08:00

A dream.

--- ---

I was trying to board an airplane, a very nice and fancy aircraft. We were on a rolling stairwell that had rolled right up to the outer doors. The night was menacing. There was a storm brewing; it was windy and starting to rain. You could see through the clear clear windows inside the plane, watch the few people filing their carryons and the flight attendants shuffling past them. There were many empty seats. This was the first-class boarding area.

Each passenger was let on one by one. Amy was in front of me. They brought her inside and I tried to follow, but a flight attendant behind me grabbed me by the ankles so that I tripped. He said, "No! This flight is full." I lay there on this corrugated metal grating, struggling, kicking at his hand. The plane began firing its engines, and I shouted over it. The flight attendant couldn't hear. I watched as the plane began taking off. There was still a line of people behind me. As the sound of engines moved on, I told the flight attendant, "That's my wife." He and some of the others in the line gave me a blank stare. "I know she's a lot prettier than me, but she's still me wife."

At this, the attendant grabbed me--I had my backpack on--and we somehow caught part of the plane. We had jumped the plane, and were now dangling on the outside. The plane dipped up and down and I saw the black sea coming towards me and then away, like I was a flying fish, gyrating in the air. The wind blew my hair slick back against my head. I felt it also pulling against my pants and so I took them off for fear of getting blown off, and watched them flutter down to the dark ocean. Then somehow the attendant got us inside. I was in boxers, so he found me a pair of jeans, waist 33 Rustlers or something. There were a little big but fit fine, and I remember thinking that I shouldn't have dropped my jeans in the ocean. When I looked in the mirror I realized I had a different button-up shirt on, so he must have provided me with a new shirt as well.

Well I didn't stay with the plane. I was left in the ocean, floating far and wide and swimming and trying to find my way back home to southern California. I'd wake up and smell salt and drift back to sleep again. The one constant was the thought and voice of my flight attendant. He was like my guardian angel. I remember how he had tried to do his job, then tried to help me. I knew he was still trying to help me, direct me along the right currents. After days--and I knew it was days due to the rising and falling of the sun--I finally found myself soaked with not saltwater but freshwater and I realized I was in a river. I floated past some reeds and an airport, and I saw the plane that I had been on. I knew at that point that the plane had been landed for days now. I also knew right then that I no longer had my backpack. [The camera zooms in on a black backpack floating in the ocean far away from the protagonist. It then zooms out to show calm, empty waves in all directions and some squawking seagulls circling around it.]

So I did some amazing business. I turned around. I was able to backtrack through the currents and the freshwater and saltwater until I discovered my lonely lost backpack. This took more days. I lost track of all time, but still had the overseeing watch of the attendant to keep me going. Once I found the backpack, I suspected that once I dried it out, everything within it, including all electronics, would still work.

I floated again past the reeds and the airport. This time I kept going, further and further until I ended up in a foreign but somehow recognizable upscale LA neighborhood. It was on a hill. The river flowed like a road, straight to it. The chimneys of nearby homes were made of strange objects, like couches and large red bottles perched on top. I began walking.

I walked through automatic gates into a beautiful mansion-home with a rock facade. This was where I was supposed to go. Everyone knew I was coming. I came inside, exhausted, hungry, and strangely dry. I sat on a couch. There were six or eight people lining the couches: media people, my agent, etc. No family.

"You've been gone for nine days."

It was like I was lost and sea, recovered into another life. I didn't recognize anyone. Then some woman showed up, dressed in black, with a handsome new boyfriend. What was she doing here? She came rushing in like a mother coming to rescue her long-lost son. Did these media people think she was my wife, and notified her?

So I stumbled back to work. I had a workstation on a long, faux-wooden church table. But I when I came back, there were workers lining many church tables. Two girls were sitting there in my old spot, staring at the same monitor. They looked up at me. It seemed we had become a call center.

I took a seat at the opposite church table, where there was an opening. I decided to make some spaghetti. I was hungry. I had this very interesting broiling-inspired method, where I had steam from one pot rise up to cook the base of another, white colander-looking pot. I burnt the spaghetti very quickly. It looked awful. People were staring at me. But I mixed it around with the sauce and it ended up looking better. It tasted fine.

--- ---

I awoke.

Mathematics

2008-02-05T16:03:00.001-08:00

I like to think that the sum of human experience--
every emotion, every exhilaration, and every defeat--
can be inhaled with each
ordinary, unspectacular breath.

Some-
times
I drive the highway on a
boring, busy afternoon, some drab lunchbreak from work,
and my life bubbles within me;
the heaving air halts on its way to my lungs
and triggers streaming thoughts
that flash like a strobe light,
crash around like bumper cars
or a pinball machine:

I see
a snowcapped mountain I climbed in the warmth of autumn,
bathing in the swelling salt of the Pacific,
leaping from bridges into low rivers,
watching childbirth with hands gripped,
numb with fright and excitement--
all these smiles upon all these faces,
icicles that grow like stalactites over my doorway,
bloodied noses, casts and stitches,
summer blowing its humid air into our deteriorating house
along with a symphony of crickets
and the sweet smell of a just-cut ballfield,
modern buildings rising like phoenixes
from the tombs of old structures,
and so on.

I am not the first
nor the last to recall these memories,
to breathe these slivers of eternity.
These experiences are intimately mine,
yet communal, shared,
like a jumbled storyboard
pieced with images from countless different films,
as if every single ceaseless second--
all sixteen frames' worth--
was made of
heartbeat fragments from other lives,
in technicolor.

There's reincarnation all around us.
Every breathed particle a small bit of everything else,
every taught or inherited trait a subtle homage to
countless others.
The very nature of life is cyclical,
and we are entangled within it,
looping back around,
rising up then lying down.
Moment follows moment, life follows life.
Just like that.

Straight from me

2008-01-31T16:38:00.000-08:00

This is a short 500-word story I wrote last year and submitted to Quick Fiction. They didn't accept it. Here it is anyway.

--- ---

Mona spent three nights sitting on the couch, crocheting a few hours each night. A skein of yarn the color of earth, specked with sandstone browns and sea greens--colors she knew Marshall would like--ran in a steady stream to her hands, and she turned it round and tucked it up until it formed the scarf, colored like the dirty desert sand, long and soft with straggly fringes. She finished by four on the third night, tucked the scarf gently under her pillow and slipped into bed, lifting the covers softly and sliding her legs next to his. He didn't stir; his back was to her and he was breathing, heavy into the sheets, muffled and slow.

When she awoke he was already gone. There was a cold snap, and today's forecast was a high of fifteen degrees. Marshall was always cold on the site, out there in the open, hands chapped and plum-colored even inside his gloves, ratty brown scarf slipping to his shoulders because it was too short and he wouldn't keep it tight. Mona draped the new scarf she'd made on the coatrack behind the door, where Marshall hung his things.

At 5:15 the front door flew open wide and Marshall came stomping in, dirty snow flying from his boots. Mona greeted him, hugged him as cold as he stood there. He hugged her back, then pulled off his gloves and unwrapped the old scarf from his neck. It was maple-brown, thick and still soft despite its age, but Mona knew it was wearing. She smiled to notice the little holes in it.

"What's this?" Marshall asked, picking up the new scarf. "Is it for me?"

Mona smiled. "I crocheted it myself."

He held it and let it hang to the floor, compared it up against his old one. "It's very nice. Thank you, Mona." He rubbed the long fringes between his fingers. "It's really so beautiful and all--but do I need a new scarf? I mean--don't take this wrong now--but this old brown one does me fine."

"But it's starting to wear," she said, and poked a finger into one of the small holes.

He yanked it away. "Careful--you'll make it worse." He looked down at it mournfully. "You can just patch it up, can't you? Make it good as gold again?"

"I could. But I wanted to give you something new. Something straight from me."

"I appreciate that. Really I do. But--for now I think I'll put this one up in the closet with my spare gloves, and I'll wear it as soon as this nice old one gets beyond repair. How's that?"

She stood straight and he took her by the shoulders, smiled and squinted into her eyes then kissed her forehead. He went in the bedroom and rustled around in the closet, then came back out again, emptyhanded.

Tomorrow and Jarom's dream

2008-01-29T15:14:00.000-08:00

Each morning while gathering together a lunch for work, I hear a telltale thump--Jarom dropping from the ladder on his bunkbed. He always walks out of his room, a little bit slowly, wearing his pajamas or his clothes from the day before, clutching his nicey or one or two stuffed animals. "Hi, Dad," he always says to me. I'm always the first one up, then him.

Today I said to him, "How'd you sleep, Jarom?"

"Why do you ask me that every time?" he asked.

"Because I always want to know."

He then told me about a dream he'd had: "Orion was sledding down a hill in a circle," he said, making a spiral motion with his hands, like the hill was a draining bathtub or a flushed toilet. "Then he got to the bottom, and he bumped into a trashcan."

"That's a funny dream, isn't it," I said to him.

"Yeah. But it's also a little bit sad."

"Why?"

"Because he bumped into a trashcan, and that hurts him."

--- ---

Sometimes the theme song to Annie starts playing in my head in a big, dramatic, orchestrated version. There's a steadily building roll on the timpani and cymbals, which sometimes seems to last forever, as if the theme song is indefinite and will always haunt the attic of my mind, and then crash!--"Tomorrow! Tomorrow! I love ya, tomorrow. You're only a day away!"

"You're only a day-- a-- way-- !"

An assignment

2008-01-15T22:06:00.000-08:00

"The lady's eyes met mine, / And held them, knowing / Very well what it was all / About." -- Gary Soto, "Oranges"

"Man is not a god, that's what you said / [. . .] I never knew a man who loved the world as much as you, / And that love was the last thing to let go." -- Gjertrud Schnackenberg, "Walking Home"

"Love what you touch, / and you will touch wisely" -- Rita Dove, "For Sophie Who'll Be in First Grade in the Year 2000"

--- ---

Another poem,
another notch on my office-sheet
bookmark. But

this one reminds me of
frailty
of life, of death and
clinging to moments,
living through actions and
words each day,
knowing the both devastating
and unsurpassable strength of
love.

This one reminds me of
youth,
and this imperfect, unkempt
world which we pass on,
which I save gingerly,
like a frail flower cupped in my hands,
to show to my
children.

And this one reminds me of
happiness,
tenderness in chasing dreams,
that shock, disbelief
when
they are realized.
And lastly, of course--
of course--
romance.

It's all here,
found out,
exposed--
harshly sometimes. These
feverish minds,
part mine, part yours.

Meditation

2008-01-10T22:15:00.001-08:00

[Composed vocally while traveling the salty marshes of western Utah.]

--- ---

I feel it,
this power,
binding, pervasive.
it is real,
it is love.

I don't know who I am addressing:
it may be you, or me, or us, or it.
I realize that my life is facilitated
by countless unnamed others:
scientists, laborers, doctors, philanthropists,
inventors, farmers, activists.

I feel I am an individual,
but I am not distinct.
I am unique,
but I am not whole--

I am part.
We are all part.
And only together
are we

whole.

God is good

2008-01-05T21:59:00.000-08:00

Papa died Sunday, and I understood.
All dead white boys say, "God is good."
White tongues hang out, "God is good."
-- Sam Beam of Iron and Wine, "Sodom, South Georgia"

Folk music and new snow,
warm heater vents.
Driving past that office building
(which I both despise and strangely love)
to visit an old friend--
a good friend--
a continent away from his home.

I pass schools and stores, gas stations.
Few cars on the road.
Halfway there I park in a cemetery.
Some graves are decorated with tiny lights,
glowing yellow--
determined beacons of the afterlife.

I think of mortality,
higher powers and purposes,
opportunities and how to squeeze this wondrous world
for each one--
how we must earn them.

I cry, not for death, loss or stagnation,
but for the unknown, unimaginable
walkways that lie broken and perfect and endless
between tonight's empty black skies
and these lighted plots.

New/old (There's a Polaroid in everything)

2008-01-02T21:46:00.000-08:00

There's something outside, tingling and singing in
the arctic night air.
I am a foreigner in my own town. Something indicates
to me that I am elsewhere, alone, someone else perhaps.
I crunch across frozen mud to the steps of the
video store, then return, toss the rented film on the
passenger seat
like an old pro.

The ground is littered with icy cakes of snow,
like abandoned mattresses laid end to end.
This place is new, though old,
foreign, though familiar.
It could be anywhere.
I wear brown mittens and the polar skies bite
at me.

There's a Polaroid in everything:
the diffuse glow of red traffic lights--
small red giants
reflected off my frosted windshield and through my glasses
until a dull glow batters my eyes;
the exhaust spouting from the car beside me,
idling at that same dying traffic light;
the plumes of laundry heat and furnace steam,
erupting upwards from ancient ramshackle buildings,
spiraling staircases of smoke;
the two boys in jumpsuits,
beating palms together to keep their fingers alive,
standing outside the state liquor store,
exhaling clouds of vapor--

Everything is translucent;
this strange world a fog,
a winter landscape seeded with sparse
signs of life.

Lights dim and heavy eyelids close all around me,
and I traverse rocky black asphalt that
smiles up at just me,
only me--
it is worth seeing, observing, watching and

waiting for.

Drive home

2007-12-21T21:42:00.000-08:00

The snow came down, balled into little fists
so many frozen comets railing against the ground
(thrown down from the heavens).
It piled up like rock salt in the streets;
our tires made thin black stripes.
The sky was one heavy sheet,
one homogeneous layer of graphite overhead.
But when the lightning struck
it changed,
inexplicably,
it melted lavender in all directions,
purple-blue luminescence.
We braked with painstaking caution,
slipping sideways over the coated roads--
rogue wanderers taking to a lake of ice.
We lurched into the curb at home,
opened up to the silent, sleepy neighborhood--
safe now from the quiet fury of December.

dream early morning december 12, 2007

2007-12-12T16:03:00.001-08:00

I dreamt last night that Jarom killed Nemo. He was up with him at four in the morning, in the bathtub. I let Jarom have Nemo in the water with him. I left, went back to sleep or something, and when I came back there was this strange-shaped orange colored thing in the water. Jarom had cranked Nemo through a plastic playdoh tool. The orange blob was still quivering, like Nemo was barely alive in there.

I smacked Jarom's head against the wall. Just hard enough so that he would know better. I did it again and again. I was a child abuser in my dream.

I took Nemo outside to bury him. As I was in the process of preparing to bury him, a fish casket salesman came by. He was dressed like an undertaker. Great timing.

Seeing sentences

2007-12-12T14:23:00.000-08:00

I see a big beautiful world.
I see people.

I see pain, heartache, hate and sorrow.
I see religion and belief, pacifists and zealots.
I see clouds moving like ocean waves over cold little desolate valleys.
I see daily routines.
I see aimless wandering.
I see comfort, but also complacence.
I see compassion and hope, people dreaming without regard for practicality or limit.
I see a little piece of me in everyone.
I see God in everything.
I see love,

it's as lucid
as a white full moon coming up
out of the black sea.

The view

2007-12-11T07:54:00.000-08:00

It's interesting that I get to sit here in an office building
so early in the morning
and stare up at a massive snowcovered mountain.
This mountain is nearly 12,000 feet tall;
I can see its peak through my little window.
It's brilliant and white and has
sloping jagged shadows strewn across it.
The streets next to me are busy, swarmed with cars.
The houses on the hill have frozen snow in the
nooks and crevices of their rooftops.

My heart sometimes feels swollen and bruised and it aches.
It makes me think of slapmarks,
or pinkeye,
or Indian burns--
something that leaves red where it shouldn't be.

That's how my heart feels sometimes.

Stalemate

2007-11-14T11:06:00.000-08:00

I prefer how it was before:
carefree, uncomplicated,
happy.
But a single all-night conversation,
a confession,
burrowed our quaint little dreamland
into a sinkhole.

I chose communication, catharsis,
knowing full well the outcome,
and now we lay back to back,
both our faces wet,
haunted so much by the present
that the joys of the past
seem like the faded sheets under us,
worn thin and forgotten,
unimportant for the
weight pressing down on them.

Hurriedly

2007-11-08T21:00:00.001-08:00

Here I am,
clipping along past glass windows
over an underground library.
My campus grounds--
I have taken them for granted.
These grounds are owned by a church,
and I walk fastpaced over them,
as if barely touching them,
trying to avoid the ground I've
known so long.
Children half my age scurry past
me booming voices and laughter
across concrete walkways.

I think of how I am here,
why and how.
Amazingly,
I have a family,
and I brought the whole of them here with me,
uprooted and towed along behind me,
silent, acquiescent.

Now I walk to a
graduate school application meeting
(which is nondenominational).
It's shortsleeves weather
in November
and it still hasn't snowed.

The setup [dream, morning of 20071105]

2007-11-05T07:57:00.001-08:00

There was this sense of doom or death, like something was happening in the background somewhere, and I only knew about it instinctively. Some mystery or crime. I felt apprehensive.

It was the middle of the night, and I was being chased through this old, bombed-out-looking downtown area, like I was back in the slums in a 1950s city. An old car was cruising around, following me. This car was a golden-yellow; it also looked like it was from the 1950s. I couldn't escape its headlights. Each corner I turned, it was there. Finally I found a strange half-height passage on a corner, and I crawled through it, through a burnt-out shell of a building, to a different side of the street. The car didn't follow. It continued on. I expected to hear the startled screams of a different man at any moment. They were looking for a good time, I figured.

[note: This car episode was an enigma in the dream. It actually happened twice. In the first, the car followed me and then some prohibition-era, gangster-looking men came out of it and beat me ruthlessly. But then it was as if I rewound time, and I was able to replay the scene, to do it right the second time through or something. That's what is recorded above.]

I ran up a dark, sloping hill that was covered in dead leaves and mud and had some thick-trunked trees growing on it. There was an old plantation house-style mansion on the grounds ahead of me. I walked up to the house and two girls were there waiting for me--average-looking, but seemingly seductive and sly. They were in nightshirts and pajama bottoms. "Do you want to come in?" I was nervous and wanted to leave, but followed them inside regardless. They took me upstairs to the kitchen area, and proceeded to turn on an outdoors light, where you could see what looked like sycamore trees through the kitchen windows, right up there against the house. Then they took out large butcher knives. "It's a game," they said.

I was scared and needed a way out. They wore innocent smiles, but I felt that there was some deeper motivation--plus I had that feeling, that something was going on around this town.

"You just throw the knife against the tree and see if you can make it stick," one of the girls said. So that was the game. Then I noticed the faint-red footprints in the white carpet, tracing footsteps through the living room and beyond. I ran into the next room where it was dark, and I tripped, entangled in a mass of stickiness and hanging wiring and a soft substance. The light came on and with it, the looming secret made clear. A skewered, bloodied body was hanging in wires from the rafters, a young boy--Don Shugan, I thought, though he was hardly recognizable.

It was all a setup.

There had been a party at the mansion that night. I didn't attend. Things obviously took a turn for the worse. Turned into murder. They needed someone to blame, someone to take the fall--hence the car and the girls.

I had been away from the mansion all night and now they had drawn me there, covered me in the victim's blood. They had done it perfectly. I ran out the porch door, went sprinting past the sycamores in the pitchblack. I stopped and put my hands on my knees, panting, waiting for the sirens I knew would be coming, just out there among the trees, waiting.

The legend of Rolling Mountain Thunder

2007-10-31T00:05:00.000-07:00

He came across the interstate in 1959
with a rusted-up car and a weighted-down mind.
When he couldn't make it up past the Reno line
he turned his car around,
he was lookin to be found,
and the wind howled, "rolling mountain thunder."

So he settled down in Imlay, got the land for cheap,
and he figured out that he was better off a Creek.
With an apocalyptic prophecy to fuel his dreams,
he started it up then--
he built a monument,
while he sang, "rolling mountain thunder."

He welcomed wanderers and vagrants and all their kind--
he was always sympathetic toward a roaming mind.
If you showed up emptyhanded you were let inside,
given a bed and a plate
if you pulled your own weight
and listened to Rolling Mountain Thunder.

Always smokin with a mason jar in one of his hands,
always craftin carefully; he was no simple man.
No one really knew his vision, no one knew his plan.
He made a work of art
from discarded parts--
the great Chief Rolling Mountain Thunder.

I was only nine years old when the great chief died,
when that elder artisan was thinking suicide,
then he went and pulled the trigger neath the blue blue sky.
It was a tragedy.
The monument complete.
And they mourned Rolling Mountain Thunder.

Then the place it went forgotten, started fallin apart.
And the state, it didn't care for some cemented art
standing naked in the desert sun, all bleak and stark,
with painted faces, all,
and bottles in the wall
that remembered Rolling Mountain Thunder.

Then I was coming cross the desolated desert sprawl,
doin eighty on the 80 in the heart of fall
when that great spirit whispered through that bottled wall
and it caught my ear--
it wasn't hard to hear.
It sang, "rolling mountain thunder."

Now all those colored statuettes and all the patchwork rock
smilin out in all directions, a contented flock,
a reminder to remember what the past has wrought--
they are Americans.
We're all Americans.
And we'll sing, "rolling mountain thunder."

October office morning

2007-10-29T11:08:00.000-07:00

Through the window
the world brightens slowly.
I am early, first to emerge
from the nocturnal black cloud.

A single green-poled streetlamp
glows burnt-orange,
a sunlike orb across the
avenue, perched on a wet lawn.

These two blinding liquid-crystal monitors
reflect my profile in the window glare.
My features seem a blur,
vacant and pale and white:

awkward black glasses over a thick nose,
hiding skinny eyes,
lips chapped from the deepening
season and a forlorn mound of hair.

My heart moves begrudgingly,
its reluctant pulses
prefer lost bedside comforts.
My tea is overbrewed, a waste.

I keep the office light off, because
I prefer the darkness.
And as always, I'm sure this Monday morning
is missing something.

The ashes

2007-10-16T14:31:00.000-07:00

Outside my window
the ash trees have already dropped
their yellowed leaves.

Piles are raked
by jolly immigrant workers under
the heavy afternoon sky

and loaded into dark bins,
then hauled to a waiting truck, dented and
coated with rust

with LANDSCAPING stenciled
in whitewash on the wooden slats
of the pickup bed.

Now the trim winter lawn
is clear again--like a body left naked,
bedsheets pulled back;

the neighboring ponderosa pines
point their verdant needles heavenward,
all full and defiant,

hovering comfortably over the roadway,
next to barren bark, the grisly remains
of thriving once-green.

Aspartame not a part of me

2007-10-08T10:20:00.000-07:00

In the last two months I've cut my aspartame intake by at least 75%. Cut it completely out of yogurt, gum, mints, etc., and probably cut 75% of my diet soda intake, though I'm still working on cutting that down to 90 and then 100%. Anyway, here's an article about a new study that may instill fear in some, may leave others unconvinced, but either way aspartame just seems a wee bit evil to me. I know the studies and the article and comments and such are inconclusive. Guess it's always that way (especially when money and the money-serving FDA are involved), but either way, I'll be glad to be completely rid of it.

On another note, the absolutely best diet soda out there is Virgil's. It's microbrewed, sweetened only with stevia and xylitol (natural, nonchemical sweeteners), made with all-natural ingredients, comes in bottles (so no plastic or aluminum taste, plus very recyclable), and is absolutely delicious and worth every penny of the 1.39 you pay per 12 oz. bottle (about the same price you pay for a 20 oz. of much worse-tasting diet soda). They make root beer, cream soda, and black cherry cream soda. And it's owned by Reed's, the ginger company. Check your local health food store for some. It's awesome.

My new motto

2007-10-07T10:48:00.000-07:00

Let me just display this pretty amazing quote from one Millard Kaufman, who, if you're a McSweeney's enthusiast, you've already met in one form or another.

Years ago, I was working in Italy, and Charlie Chaplin and his family came from Switzerland. We were at a beach north of Rome, and it was a very foggy day and the beach was lousy. At about three o'clock it cleared up, and Chaplin said, "I'm going back to the hotel. Unless I write every day, I don’t feel I deserve my dinner."^[-->]

I just think that line from Charlie Chaplin is amazing. "If I don't write every day, I don't feel I deserve my dinner." I think that's my new mantra. No kidding.

Distant rock fading

2007-10-04T12:39:00.000-07:00

Early autumn, a slurry of cirrus overhead.
This season never lasts long here.
A few days or so of color and then the leaves begin to
fall, beaten back by thick breezes and high-desert storms.
But during those few days of color
Timpanogos
is patched about like a rainbow,
with absinthe greens,
cinnamon browns and the color of beets,
and an overwhelming rusted-orange that
flows across most of the mountain
like a tidal wave of ferrous sand.
Along it slopes quartzite,
limestone and fragments of old ocean beds
all crusted over with lichen--
somehow living
without soil, clinging
to a rock;
the lichen is the same rust-orange color of the leaves.

From the roadway Timpanogos is just another
one of those sedimentary rocks,
covered with lichen;
and the further we trespassers
remove ourselves into our homes,
the further the view recedes,
the more distant, more faded becomes
that kingly overseer of our naive little valley.

Mechanical drivers

2007-10-03T15:17:00.000-07:00

Back in April I read this brief article in Discover about driving. Here's the tagline: "Driving used to be about taking on the world. Now it’s about being tucked in for a nap." It's so true, isn't it? The automated car stuff can be a little annoying. See, I actually like driving, being on the road and taking road trips. I like to press down on the pedal, change gears myself. I like driving something a little older, so that I can actually work on if I choose. Nowadays you buy a new car, and nobody but a computer engineer can diagnose it or figure it out.

Cars used to be symbols of "personal freedom" and "rugged individualism." That's how I still feel--my car becomes in some strange way an extension of myself, which can be both positive and negative, but come on, you're in your car often enough that you need to give it some personal character, some attributes that say, "this car's mine" (that's why some of us love bumper stickers and the sort). But now we've gone from "muscle car to computerized chauffeur," where the car tries and wants to do everything for us. An illustration of this: We went up to Baker City last month, and Rustin was showing me this feature on his Jeep Liberty--pitch control. He couldn't pitch the car even if he wanted to. His demonstration of this left me white-knuckled and dead silent, but he was right. As we barreled down the dirt forest road doing sixty, he threw the steering wheel toward the trees, and amazingly, it corrected itself and kept us on the road. The car was in control, not the driver.

Then we add DVD players to keep kids satiated (yes, I use one too, but I don't like to, and try to play car games as often as possible), and get GPS units that literally talk to us, telling us where to go. Cars are basically becoming large transportation robots that do all the work for us. That's the problem though--if the car does all the work, does that mean the work is worthless, something to finish up quickly? I don't feel this way--that's why I like my feet on the pedals, one hand on the wheel and one of the shifter. I like to be able to replace my own brake pads and replace a clutch if I have to (dirty, dirty work). My car is valuable to me. I value my own driving, my own navigation skills (if I get lost, I guess I'm lost), and my own sense of control.

I recently acquired a car, a 1993 Honda Civic. While it's 14 years old, it still has the typical amenities we've gotten used to: power steering, power windows, power lock (driver side only). But beyond that, it's very basic. It's a manual transmission, which I have always loved, again because of the control issue--with a stickshift I control more of the car. Last weekend we went to California and this thing got us 36 to 38 miles per gallon on the freeway. That's with two adults and three children in the tiny car. So why are the best non-hybrid cars these days getting a maximum of 35 miles per gallon? In fourteen years the automotive industry couldn't keep up with itself? It's sad, but I'm sure it's commercially-driven (no pun intended) and after reading this article about Partial Zero Emissions Vehicles and how you legally *cannot* buy them in most states, my suspicions are confirmed. Don't trust the automotive industry.

Anyway, I reckon most of you folks are with me on this. And I'm not talking environmental issues here--that's another story. (But if I were, I'd say the usual: drive less, walk and bike more. If you live less than ten miles from work you should seriously consider biking. Lower your overall emissions and CO2 output. Increase legally-enforced emissions standards nation- and worldwide. If you need a car, buy it used.)

Let's be more connected to our surroundings, our journeys and destinations. Let's care about how we get there. Let's keep driving a liberating adventure, a freedom-imparting excursion that's exciting every time. It's more than just commuting or traffic or smog. It's the summertime wind through your hair at seventy miles an hour that few humans 200 years ago could dream of feeling.

Read this stuff:
Peer Review: Dreary Driving
Dirty Secret: Green Cars Automakers Won't Sell You

Dark sky

2007-09-24T11:41:00.000-07:00

I recently read an article in The New Yorker about the nighttime sky and its darkness. Even with how much I enjoy astronomy and stargazing, I never gave this issue too much thought before. I just thought, "Hey, it's skyglow, what can you do? Let's find a nice dark spot like out in the middle of Nevada or north of Nine Mile Canyon." Just like the environmentalists tell Owen in the article, it was a soft issue for me.

But let's really think about our relationship with the night sky. Do we have anywhere close to the same relationship with the night today as others did one hundred years ago? No way. We love to light up our skies. We don't care to watch darkness fall and envelop the earth. We like to broadly illuminate our buildings at night, instead of seeing them by moonlight and starlight, instead of seeing their silhouettes and large darkened grandiose, even menacing, shapes against the blueblack backdrop of everything cosmic. We like perpetual day.

If there's anything we can do to better our nighttime viewing--whether it's advocacy, activism, education, sharing these ideas with others, adjusting our homes and yards to use full-cutoff or fully-shielded lighting, turning all lights out at night, calling the city to ask for pointless streetlights to be shut off, or even throwing rocks at those streetlights--we should do it. Also, we should donate to and join the International Dark-Sky Association.

Oh yeah, and vandalism appears to *increase* with more constant lighting. So don't use any lights at all, or just motion detection. And less lighting at night means lots of savings in electricity for everyone. Plus less carbon emissions because of the lessened electricity.

It's just sad to think we'll never see the sky the same as we did when we were kids. The earth's just getting artificially brighter. Even what we see tonight will only get worse and more washed-out. Maybe this is just a soft issue. But I think it's an important one.

Read "The Dark Side" article for more information on all this stuff.

Timpanogos caves

2007-09-20T08:58:00.001-07:00

I just finished up my Flickr photoset about our trip to Timpanogos Cave National Monument. The set is right here.

I also made a brief blog about it, which includes many of the pictures, over here at the family blog.

El vaquero de la luna

2007-09-19T15:47:00.000-07:00

I've been doing a lot of updates on Flickr with my sets and photos. I will post more when they're fully fleshed out, but for now I wanted to say that I updated my photoset that includes my favorites.

Check it out here.

Baker City

2007-09-16T09:16:00.000-07:00

So over Labor Day weekend we went to Baker City in eastern Oregon to visit some family. It was a short but entertaining trip. I've outlined it and included some pictures here.

dream

2007-09-10T09:07:00.001-07:00

Last week I had a brief dream. This is what I remember:

I was on my cell phone with Emily. Yes, my old girlfriend. Only, the dream wasn't about her. She was just a dream-device I apparently was using. We were talking about Shawnee. We were very upset with her. She was moving to California with her boyfriend. They planned to be there for one year. It seemed so ludicrous to us. Why Shawnee, why? How could you!

Anyway, I was on some school campus with concrete blocks to sit on in the quad or something like that, and I kept racing around while talking angrily and vigorously to Emily about Shawnee's situation. I don't know what was so wrong with it, but we obviously disapproved.

Wondrous thunderous

2007-09-05T07:30:00.000-07:00

Outside, the thunder beings made voices. It was 6:50, and I was awake because Bella was awake. The morning twilight made everything yellow as it came through the muddy clouds. Lightning struck and struck again, briefly lighting the sky and the stormclouds before the rolling thunder voices cracked like commanding whips. I couldn't help but think of their power. I couldn't help but think they were talking to me, just me; even though this valley is overflowing with bodies and souls the thunder beings wanted only to speak to me. Bella lay awake in bed, and I was worried she would be afraid. I talked to her. "Do you hear the thunder?"
"No," she lied. "Listen," I said, just as a quiet voice boomed through the sky.
"Thunder is the sound of lightning," I told her. "It's like voices speaking to us. They are the thunder beings. They are kind, but powerful too. Do you hear how strong they are?"
"Yes."
"I love you, Bella."
"I love you, Dad."
Then the rain came pouring down like an ocean was dropped on us, its lukewarm waters coming in bucketsful. I stood under our sheltered little porch in only my red underwear, feeling the splashes and drips of the rain as it jumped the two front steps onto my feet. I looked through the yellow air, wanting to go stand in it and let my bedhair instantly be smothered by water from the sky. But I didn't. I don't know why. I went back inside and got dressed and made a lunch instead.
When I left for work the rain had let up. The air wasn't yellow anymore. The thunder and lightning has stopped, voices quieted. Dingy patches of bluegray sky poked through the receding storm. Thick groups of college kids hung out at 8 am at the bus stop, hoping to be to school on time. They started school yesterday, and this time I am not with them, I am not one of them. This time I drive by them on my way to work; my bike's at home by the washer, my backpack's empty and on the floor by the desk. Rainwater churned up in circles under my black tires, and I listened to Dolorean and thought about the sunrise and starlings.

Dilapidated

2007-09-04T15:47:00.000-07:00

My mind is conflicted. Two halves pushing against each other, almost forced that way. So much I want to write and do and think. But I'm holed up in an office all pseudo-comfortable focusing on things that waste my time, that are wasteful. There's so much else I could be doing. But I need to earn, to make money, to make a living. It's hypocritical I know, it's counterproductive and yet, I don't know how else to evade it right now. I want out, but I also want in. I want to explore and interrogate the world and my own mind. I want to probe depths and swim through my mucky thoughts--it's a swamp in there I tell you, but it's hardening, igneous-style, a liquid dynamo of lava into sedentary rock. Rock is great--I love rock--it's large and grandiose but just there, always just there and unable to do anything. Sure it can be imposing, but it can also be conquered. Oh our mountainous minds.

So what to do? Keep feeling confused? Keep going about my business in ways I wish I weren't? No, no way. I can't keep it up. My ambition (do I really have any?) will have to flow out, and quickly, through other outlets. Okay I guess I just made up my mind.

I feel like Mikie.

Library night

2007-08-09T19:32:00.001-07:00

For my 291 class that I took online, one of the assignments asked that I write a sonnet. So in ten minutes, I whipped up the beauty that you see below.

Rhyme scheme is abba cddc effe gg, which is one of the forms Wyatt used--technically English (Shakespearean), but really kind of a mix between the English and Italian (Petrarchan).

--- ---

The moon is smiling shyly overhead
like Joyce's shell half-buried on the shore.
I study words, but she whom I adore
is waiting there, half-covered on our bed.

Imprisoned in this building made of glass
and brick and filled with books and endless thought,
wishing I were somewhere I am not,
instead of reading pages for a class.

She waits there patiently, so sleepless, still--
and when I crack the door she'll welcome me
with the warmth of arms and face and body--
but only if I leave this place. I will.

Biking, soundless moonlight searing bright,
I ride toward home to steal her from the night.

Dream, morning of 20070801

2007-08-01T11:30:00.000-07:00

My first dream of August.

I must have been at some sort of high school reunion gathering--though I didn't know it at first--at the coast. People were drowning offshore, and I was finding lifejackets and throwing them out to them, telling them to hold on. Jarom was helping me throw them. It was overcast and dismal out, like the Northern California coast; there was a breeze but it was still warm out. I was wearing my Lotus lifejacket, dressed to raft. I went running to find more lifejackets to save people. I ran past Lisa Adams, and turned, recognizing her, shouted her name. She didn't notice me, and I had to keep running, had to save people. I turned into a little shop, and there was Evan Lehrman and Scott the tennis player [note to self: look up his last name in the yearbook]. Evan said, "Hey dude" and I said hey in return. They looked surprised and one said, "You have a goatee!" And I was offended because I did *not* have a goatee, I just had some scruff that grew in thicker around the chin. Then I grabbed some lifejackets out of the breadbox and said, "Sorry, people are drowning." And they just sipped back on some beverages while I ran outside again.

I threw out a few more vests. Then I found a gondola-boat and rode it inside the cathedral, where the moat was internal and wove through the church. It was beautiful inside, with ornate ornaments carved in soft cream-colored stone: lions' heads and candlesticks and posts and columns.

I got off the gondola later and was hurriedly going elsewhere when I ran into Mom by some steps. She was looking for me, worried about me. I said I was fine, not to worry, then went running again down the halls, softly carpeted in red and lined with golden metalwork and draped with fine bloodred silk curtainry.

Dream, morning of 20070622

2007-07-12T11:43:00.000-07:00

[A dream, from last night/this morning, before waking up--late for work--at 8:12 am, after hitting snooze countless numerous times and breaking my self-avowed promise to finally be to work at 8 am because they had hooked me up in some ways with love:]

There was a major rainstorm, flood, just me and the kids at home [this just after I told them a rainstorm/lightning/oak tree/rainbow/treasure story last night]; I watched as the streets flooded--we were in our current home but a different version of it, somewhere removed or different--and this sloping hill to the left of the house became mudridden and sloppy, the water rushing up quickly over the gutters (which ran in a stream eastward, to the left towards presumably the mountains). It covered the front yard and all you could see through the window was a thick, transparent view of the dark outside, like looking through TV-rock, ulexite. The slanting, thick strands of pouring rain came like clear jail bars and we were trapped inside. Amy was not home. I remember going out back, by the trash cans (at this point it's a different house, with a garage attached to a concrete backyard/patio, and there are black trash bins there; the sloping hill is now to my right, because I'm out back, and the mud and water mix is visible and ready to pour off this high concrete step, to drown me and start the actual flooding of the actual house). Then the rain has stopped, and there are clouds and bluer sky and birds flying in it, but the water is still everywhere and we don't know if it's just a lull or the storm is over and everything is miraculously saved, no flooding, now just waiting for the mighty waters to recede.

Then I am in a large mansion. More like in a large room in a large mansion; there is sweeping crystal and golden chandelier overhead. There are stairways at each of the four compass direction of the room. Each stairway climbs up then curves, creating a small squared-spiraling staircase up to some connecting bridge or walkway overhead. I am there, and Orion is there too, somewhere, with me. Jonathan is there. There is crying. There has been a family feud. There has been death.

During the rains, members of my family and members of Jonathan's family were out in it, playing or hunting or otherwise recreating. Heather, Darin, Amy and Adie were there, at least. Perhaps Mikie and Joey too. Not my parents. Jonathan's wife and both of his parents, along with some cousins or other relatives who apparently had some gang relations. There was a fight among them. All I knew is that is was about "politics." I kept chanting the word, hating it: "Politics--politics, politics--politics." Every one of them was dead. Our entire families dead. I was left alone with my kids. Why did they all die? Could this be true? This must be my imagination, right? Dreaming?

Jonathan was wounded, a war veteran. He had been out with them. Both of his legs were missing. He was using his hands to drag himself. I would ask him, regardless of his wounds or state of mind: "What happened? Is it even possible for them all to die? What, did they all fire off their guns at the same time, hitting each other perfectly, mortally, all dropping to the wet forest floor at the same time? It's impossible. What happened?" I just couldn't picture it. This was (obviously, appropriately) very difficult for me to grasp, for me to comprehend.

Jonathan could not answer me. He had no answer. He sat on his stumps on the floor, and there were other people pouring into this mansion-room-dininghall. They were his, our customers. They needed their services, their goods, whatever it was that we provided them. Jonathan and I were in business together. The business took priority. But wait! Jonathan made an announcement--seemingly directed to me, because I was out of my mind and miserable and constantly questioning him. He said, "Let's all come back tomorrow and figure this thing out. For now, any money you could offer"--he said this part to the customers--"would be much appreciated. We are going through a hard time." One old man--a farmer, missing teeth, with strands of hair and looking just like Mr Nebbercracker from Monster House--threw down a thin plastic produce bag filled with some loose change, a couple quarters and then some, probably under a buck.

Aphelion: time to celebrate

2007-07-06T13:48:00.000-07:00

We're at aphelion today--the farthest Earth gets from the sun! (even though it's summer--the closest we get [perihelion] is in January).

Doesn't feel like we're too far from the sun though. At about 101 degrees.

I still love you Dave

2007-06-19T15:31:00.000-07:00

I've been reading You Shall Know Our Velocity! by one of my favorite literary heroes, Dave Eggers. Now read this paragraph:

I understood the Earth's shadow on the moon. I knew that the Earth was hiding most of the moon from the light this night, leaving a curved white blade. What I didn't know was why the moon and its shadow should be so clear, the lines so clean. The sun wasn't at all clear; its outline was debatable and changing. And though I know the sun is gas and the moon is rock, still I wonder why the moon's circumference would be so clear, its edges so crisp--cut from cardboard with scissors. (38)

Beautifully written, right? Right. Inarguably. Assuredly. The problem is in the editing, the factchecking! Dave Eggers is a fantastic writer, but it's just not at all true that the earth's shadow is responsible for the phases of the moon. It's the light from the sun and the moon's position relative to it. The earth and moon don't orbit on the same plane (though twice a year, when the moon does pass--briefly--through earth's shadow, a lunar eclipse occurs). Didn't any editor--at McSweeney's, or Vintage, or during its retitling and then unretitling--notice this? Or at least feel at all peculiar about the assertion? Oh well--I didn't know what a pachinko was. Maybe everyone just trusted him. Anyway.

Also, I do understand that this misconception could quite possibly be intentional, intended to represent the character Will's idea/surety that the earth's shadow causes the moon's phases. Or maybe later on in the novel (because I haven't finished it yet) something else is somehow revealed, and I will eat my criticism (and if the book does make me take this back, I'll come back and edit this post and retract my statements and apologize profusely to the great virtual Eggers-god).

Okay, back to the lovely book.

This is me outside

2007-06-15T15:54:00.000-07:00

I'm lying on shorn grass,
sloping down longside a manmade river
with amaretto brackish water
but there are tall shoreside weeds
and the greyblue sky
and unwoven strands of clouds
like veins of milk
above.

Cut short, the grass prickles
the backs of my knees and neck;
it is stiff and unforgiving--
a bed of thin nails,
why we call them blades
(an insect's bite would be indiscernible).
But I feel I could roll through it
down the sloping hillside
and still somehow be cushioned,
that it's soft regardless of
appearances.

A small spider,
yellow and black with a pattern
of white on its abdomen--
like a spider-bumblebee--
climbs near my eye.
It's a droplet of sweat--
I brush it away, expecting liquid,
but that spider climbs on my finger
and waits, pauses, plays its
stout hairless legs across my skin,
then leaps to the grass,
gone.

I want to look high into the
sun's orangegolden brightness,
the small stretch of sky
that is off-limits--
would being blinded by the sun have its
benefits?

Once, we weren't so afraid
of the sun--sunscreen and air-conditioning
and hatred of its heat--
we played in it,
let ourselves sweat,
let it bathe our bodies
without fear of UV-induced skin cancer.
We were fearless and young and loved
the sun.

But now I will pick myself up
off this sticky-wet grass
and wipe my still-(always)-perspiring body
with an old pink and white towel,
and walk through two sets of doors
using a keycard,
up one floor through another door or two,
into a climate-controlled office lit by sunlight,
leisurely dripping in through
two spotless tinted windows,
like enormous sunglasses facing
the mountains.

Lying in beds

2007-06-10T09:52:00.001-07:00

Tonight I put my hand on your face
as you drifted to sleep--
it covered nearly all of it.
I felt your pulse pushing softly near my thumb,
your cheek warm and bare
against my hand and fingers,
our skin traced in faint lines and marked from
the slow years,
but plain and naked the way we were made.

And it came to me,
how all these other bodies
lie in beds with faces exposed,
yet my hand is on yours,
touching the lines where you smile,
feeling your heart settling slowly,
watching shut eyes dream.

So I put my other palm against my own face and
held it there,
connected us with my hands.
I felt the pricks of wispy auburn hairs
sprouting over my cheek,
as warm as yours.

I thought of the many
other things that try to connect us:
waves and wires and digits,
devices and lenses that capture us,
transmit things through blank screens,
fuel to relocate us;
how these things are powerless
and trivial--
they are not like two faces, bodies, hearts and lives
connected by two hands
in the dark space of night.

Divorce (or small dark scars framed in white)

2007-06-06T02:19:00.000-07:00

I miss the sounds of children,
their warm hands slapping against my cinderblock walls,
the same walls that caught their gentle breaths,
sheltered them asleep at night;
and heard their voices--
the way some deepened and boomed,
while others grew tender and lovely.

I miss the midnight pool lights,
lit up secretly during summer,
their droning neon buzz and the parade of moths
that continually danced in the pale lamplight,
the quiet laughter and excited splashes,
the way the lights turned off abruptly
from the inside once discovered on.

I miss the cavalier pursuits of youth
under the stoic gaze of adulthood,
the unconcerned and the desperate
trying to balance themselves within my walls,
in a house where love and joy
made occasional tidal bursts
instead of steady even flows.

I miss the lost looks of the parents,
staring at their reflections
in the bedroom mirrors, the bathroom vanity--
I watched them age,
wrinkles widening, greying hairs lengthening;
I watched their eyes darken into hard black pinpoints,
their lips pursed tight together
as they came and went
and passed each other wordlessly at night.

I miss the hollow hole--unrepaired for years--
hammered through my back bedroom door by an angry fist
and a rough cry of shock and defeat;
all that sleeping in two separate beds,
two separate rooms when I wished it were one;
and the dinnertable quarrels around a checkbook,
because it was all the conversation they ever had.

I miss the moving men,
who carelessly scraped paint from my doorway
with the edges of the old chestnut dresser
(the one with the burnt black incense circle),
making small dark scars, framed in white;
the look of the bare orange kitchen tile,
those once-crowded countertops useless,
all closets empty, walls and carpets immaculate:
abandoned.

I miss those same voices I once loved,
so vacant, so feeble and hollow now,
mechanically announcing quick arrivals and quicker exits
(ephemeral, the way a child can become an adult
and then quickly pace down these old familiar hallways
after so many years).

I miss the sounds of their engines
as they drove away,
separate cars into separate worlds.
The lifeless bonds that
time and remembrance forged between us all
forgotten,
left with a SOLD sign like a headstone
and a small stack of flyers
strewn across the naked kitchen countertops.

Passage of a recovering gasoline addict

2007-06-05T08:54:00.000-07:00

I remember how I intended never to pay more than
two dollars a gallon,
then it was three,
then four.

Yesterday I drove to a lonely station,
seeking the cheapest purchase--
but it was deserted, forever advertising at $3.09.
Inside, lights from a Pepsi refrigerator still blazed
and half-empty paperboard boxes held
solitary packages of M&Ms and Snickers bars.
Wooden "For Lease" signs propped against the windows outside,
set in the barren auburn dirt above breaking concrete,
and the bloodred roof shingles were covered in dust,
as if a hot desert wind had flown over them for decades.

At home I untangled my bike from next to the washing machine.
I wiped off layers of lint,
inflated the tires, added a small aluminum rack
with bungee cords and carabiners to secure my things.
I rode out into the streets in the early morning,
felt leg muscles crackling and straining
from inexperience.
I felt the sun's subtle heat as it crested mountain peaks
and touched across my cheek and neck,
impelling me to propel myself further forward,
past pavement and exhaust, intersections and blaring horns.

I rode up through the canyon,
heavy dry mouth heaving from canine panting, thirst.
The motorway sounds faded to a dull growl,
a humming roar drifting backward and
behind me with every passing meter.
I stopped near the small park
where ornamental maples overhang the walkway,
riverside ferns grow along their trunks
and a waterfall plunges lazily upstream--
all of it vacant like the gas station. I sat atop a wellworn
picnic bench, its wood still damp with morning dew.

And with the summer sun now sparkling and clear to the east
I turned about to look over
my journey, down into the valley--
to watch gasoline stations withering in the distance,
their monetary marquees like neon flags
or blinking communication towers.
Insectile vehicles crawl on all fours,
desperately attracted to them, starving, needing them;
without them they see no other way, no alternative:
mechanical moths to a bonfire flame.

Mick Kelly

2007-04-30T21:30:00.000-07:00

The old 1898 school, being restored--
a squat block of brick and wood and
newly placed, sharp-tinted windows,
with a slanted steep roof and some scattered shingles,
some plywood angled up and high.
The heat of early March, nearly spring,
and in the purple light of the disappearing sun
I scaled up to that unfinished roof,
up three floors and past grey exposed sheetrock and
pale twobyfours, to a small propped ladder against the sky.
I walked lightfooted and straddled the peak,
the warm wood against my legs; I watched the
darkening light, blazing slowly down behind the distant west mountains,

and I sang out like Mick Kelly--favorite songs,
about existing and knowing it,
about love and dying and holding hot hands,
palms sweating near the lake in the summer,
of being young and hungry and unspoiled, untainted--
fearful even at the bigness and greatness of life
and its sorrows and joys.
About reality.
About all being connected by strands, links to each other,
to soil and cloud and human heart and animal eyes
and a common soul--
a sweeping-blue oceany soul, made of sky and sea and depth.

That sweet taste of reaching infinity,
between all of us and our minds
and uttered from our lips
into a common stream of need and hope and
love.

Eye tonight

2007-04-19T01:47:00.000-07:00

I am drinking rooibos tea flavored with gingerbread house icing and lavendar honey.
I am writing about James Joyce and Stephen Dedalus and Stephen and Daedalus.
I am three days behind with this assignment, my seminar paper.
I am almost done with the semester.
I am still awake and it is three a.m.
I am worried about taking four online classes at once.
I am not always motivated.
I am very full because I have eaten a lot today.
I am ready for a departure.
I am prepared for a change.
I am now home from the library. I was there before seven and I left at 1:45 when the cello-orchestrated Nothing Else Matters started playing over the loudspeakers. An orchestrated version of The Legend of Zelda themesong follows that, and tonight I missed it.
I did come home for one hour from 10:30 till 11:30, though.
I was able to successfully find all BYU's archived and bound copies of James Joyce Quarterly.
I am a procrastinator, and sometimes that worries me.
I am dry in this Utah weather.
I am dry though it snowed all day today.
I am wondering whether the mountains look as beautiful hidden in the dark of night as they do during the sunset.
I am wishing that certain magical and wonderful things happened to me.
I am thinking, thinking, thinking, and not getting anywhere.
I am not Einstein.
I am no fabulous artificer.
I do not have a strange name.
But I'm me all the same.

Shadows, seeds

2007-04-16T01:23:00.000-07:00

I came out into the high spring evening sun,
my tall shadow trailing behind me--
it looks like me, connected to me,
black and fearless it is me.
I thought of James Dean and his Spyder on Highway 46,
and I walked past the junipers,
the sweetgums and birches,
planted purposefully in green hilly mounds.
I slid my hand over the chafed and chipped handrail,
all rustbrown except on top--
scraped bare to the metal,
the pavement-clacks of the skateboards told me why.

They too had slid across it,
scraped it, and made long shadows
all colorless behind,
brightened and blocked out on hot pavement.
I stepped forward with hands on that cool wounded rail,
the warm setting sun soaking me and coloring the
greens and browns
of the trees, with their soft hanging catkins,
and dry winter branches
sprouting pale new shoots of mossy green,
heavy with bloom and seed.
I sat on a hill and watched the world washed
in color,

while the day pressed to an end and the sky rotated round.
Time did not exist.
I felt this emotion, in this moment:
just a feeling
that I can't express--I could never.
I can't say what it is I want, or what I sense;
it's just a feeling.

So I sat and thought of that colliding car,
of Santa Barbara and crisscrossing highways
and youth and growth--seasons of planting and harvest
and rebirth,
of all the seeds that would never take root,
all the abandoned ideas and half-thought thoughts,
all the lives that would be lost at twentyfour,
such stifled vitality.

I held the prickly brown seed from the sweetgum,
knew that it was like living:
painful and inflicting, yet full of potential,
spines surrounding germs of hope--
and I was the writer without words,
the rebel without a cause.

Daytrip to the meadows

2007-03-30T18:09:00.000-07:00

Anxious and hungry, we are thirsty for fluid nighttime lights
and a view from the dead flatness of earth.
And so we soar southward over cool blacktop
in the close, sunless morning--
a small restless flock we are, buffeted about by westpacific winds--
until over Delano and the Tushars daylight crowns, quick and golden,
same as seven a.m. summers when my eyes crack to the light
and breathe in heavy awake the heaving morning air.

The blue sky, pale blue sky colored like
milky soap bubbles on a freshscrubbed sidewalk
blazes through the red sandstoned buttes, the ruddy bluffs behind us.
Edge of the mojave and we patrol the wideopen road;
joshua trees line up the freeway (those hands to the sky),
first guarding the guardrails
then spreading out and off and further,
scattered in forest patches the distant claycolored sand.

On a long desert boulevard we arrive in the midst of chaos,
next to a stadium brimming with colors and bodies
and surrounded by hard white trailers and numbered flags and barbeques.
We are ushered in by these celebrity helicopters, circling closer and
hovering just above our heads like sleek painted falcons, shining
and swimming through sunlight, one-by-one. Policecar lights splay on
chainlink fences and hot double-yellow lines, and through a queue of cars
we stumble past the spectacle, all the race-waiters.

To the architected center,
throbbing heart of a barren land, haunted by
spectres of generations of drowned hopes and sloughed dreams.
Where the earth lights the heavens instead of vice versa,
and society gathers in united strands of joy and craved emptiness--
Where desire is desired.

This city so full of people, so churning and thriving,
so consumed by artifice and laughter and swagger
and erected replicas of places they'd rather be, scenes they'd rather see.
They want the whole world condensed into one small vision;
they imagine adventure and purpose in these diversions.
(But still we come to be diverted by these diversion-seekers,
as if one with them.)

We walk miles till our legs throb and the
children must be carried--pregnant or no.
The heavy sun sinks in the Nevada soil but light never leaves;
dark only in the dimming sky.
Modeled censored girls on hard coloredpaper cutouts
litter the walkways and we trample them,
hear the clickclack of fingers flicking decks of them and beckoning
with hands extended and eyes elsewhere,
tossing mass-produced faceless bodies into the crowds,
bright glaring shirts:
"I can get you any girl in 20 minutes."

Oh Las Vegas must you be so bright
with your sidewalk stench and shine?
and all your choreographed light shows and circus parades,
dancing fountains and megaphone whores with wideopen legs
and soulless stares and the tinkling of glass,
the smell of rum and whiskey sours and thick raisiny cigarsmoke.
But even as we decry it all we can't help but watch, awed, captivated;
we can't help but smirk behind our smiles.

We leave as we came: that stadium we passed,
exploding with colors and flags and movement, all dying away.
And then the slicked waxy trucks, gleaming like greased billboards
with images of razors and two-by-fours and tall beer cans,
trail each other through the intersection taking their racers away.
And back over blacktop we flee, north toward the Wasatch,
away from the little harbor-pool of endless light in the desert.

But even as we despise it we validate it;
even as we walked its streets we gave it breath.

Tantrum after the results

2007-03-26T17:31:00.000-07:00

I shut the office door--past six and it looks like rain--
and lay down on the turf-carpet with my face up on it all flush up against it;
it smelled of socks and sunflower seed shells and scalp flakes.
I know my weaknesses, and I'm too logical, too
levelheaded for this tantrum.

I spoke clumsily in whispers and chants like some mantra of "I don't believe" gets me anywhere.

I curled up and in a daydream with my fingers clenched digging my palms
I thought of an old woman holding a mirror up to her withered face
and gasping at the sight of herself she dropped it into the dingy porcelain of the tub
where it shattered and broke, that old family heirloom,
and she said "good."

It's just that I wanted to be the best, I didn't want no comeuppance. I needed,
face to the floor like this.
Now I want to cut my hair and starve myself, to change to be different to be
better. Or just to be.
Always acting so serious, so deep ostensibly steeped in meaning I try to fill
it all in. I guess I try to mean in everything.
But isn't, there isn't meaning in everything./? (<--even in this)
Some things are just pointless. I know my weaknesses.
I'm too clearheaded and I can't cry when I try
or when I need.
But enough's enough. So I sat up.

Then on the way home,
in an old rusted white Taurus wagon with a maroon hood,
a small boy--River Phoenix in Stand By Me--
cranked his window down next to me and set his small hand
on the glass, stared at me and lifted two fingers, waved.
I stared ahead at the road and the pillow blanket of thick pregnant clouds
and lifted two of my own, waved back.

Chainsaw

2007-03-21T22:47:00.000-07:00

I saw this mighty elm in a field,
next to new highway contstruction,
and the small man holding a chainsaw underneath it,
eating into the outstretched lower limbs,
the pale, wet wood.

And I thought of mankind mining ore in the earth,
learning to purify it, melt it mold it sharpen it,
place it into that circular metal ring
then power it black with oil,
extracted up from the depths of the earth--
remains of the living, prehistoric matter.

Cut into them mighty living trees,
tear them to the ground, limb by limb, uproot the stump;
make way for an empty stretch of highway, roadway,
noxious hardened black tar set in straight lines,
inorganic, coating the soil:

an unwanted armored shell
to transport us to highrises and complexes,
to tear us off like crooked elm limbs
and then straighten us out like roads.

Lit paper lanterns

2007-02-21T09:22:00.000-08:00

My knees up at my chest,
under striped rows of
turquoise and cherry and hazy emerald.
Our reflections hover on
the curved charcoal screen that faces the bed:
Amy in her rosecolored robe, book open,
belly full; and there I am,
knees up, watching the blank television
like we're a scene:
where romantics lie on the bed in bathrobes
and they read and smile and love, and nothing
is wrong and their bare feet touch barely
under the striped Spanish blanket.
Lamps on either nightstand shine together;
they light the string of olive paper lanterns overhead,
illuminating the pages in our books with silhouettes
of bamboo stalks and leaves and branches.
And the tapestries behind and above us stretch and hang down
like stomachs, like a small child is lying in each one--
like pushing up round and warm under a quilt
where hands rest softly and silently,
and that lump groans and stirs and makes subtle movements--
a Herculean youth.

And I stare straight at the slanted screen,
at our two or three shapes connected by lit paper lanterns.

One of these days

2007-01-23T17:04:00.000-08:00

The door shudders at the hinges, and
overhead the pale thumbnail moon glows,
matches the weeks-old snow--
and my feet trample through it like it fell
just last night and stuck there,
across the church parking lot--and there even,
spread out in a moonlight quilt over our bare backyard,
hiding the dormant lawn and the apple tree's rising roots,
the frozen wooden garden boxes strapped with rusted braces,
the little tin shed and the damp dresser
with the missing leg and the loose drawers,
the old cobwebbed lawnmower and its dull, exposed blades.
Overhead the cable wires droop down heavy with white
and reach for the dark solid soil hidden under
our field of winter.
It knows just about everything, this omniscient season does,
it squeezes through every crevice and permeates the world wide
with its frost and taste of cold.

I walk past the blue and black trash bins
(through the little rickety steel gate that overgrows
with olive-colored vines in the summer).
The neighbors' light is on;
the baby cries and I watch through the fogged kitchen window
as his mother shoulders him up,
wraps him in his yellow-and-white-striped blanket
and hefts him high. She smiles and coos, walks
to calm him, to protect him from the
deep hibernation outside.
Something steams in a shiny pot on the burner,
and his father eats dinner on a brown leather easy chair
in front of the television screen,
flickering sports highlights.

So I lay down out back there under the naked apple tree,
all wet and cold and bare, stiffening in that windless clear,
watching the line of icicles that parade across the eaves
single file like deep translucent roots of ice
or clear January speartips made by the trickling warmth
of the slow southern sun in the daytime.
They are bent downward bound for the street,
bound to break loose one of these days.

I want my arms and legs to just freeze up
and stop being me, so I can quit feeling cold
and feel something else for a change,
something that takes more than sensation
or season or temperature.
Something crying like a fetus at the walls of the womb.
--Let me out.
--Let me out!
--Let me in.

I am ready to begin.

The hero

2007-01-09T01:31:00.000-08:00

So I played Guitar Hero from 11 till 1 tonight, with Mike and his brother James' house in Pleasant Grove. Just got home. Ran over an already-destroyed sheep in the middle of the road on the way there. It disgusted me. There were this huge massive lump of white in the middle of the road; I thought it was snow except for all the red splattered all around. It got up in my undercarriage I think too cause later I was smelling burnt lamb from inside my engine and I was sickened. I drove over these frozen drifts of snow made from the plows to try and clean my car off. On the way home though the whole creature was gone, all evidence removed (hallelujah). Some poor soul had to clean it up. A cop maybe. I was picturing it in my mind, who had to deal with it. Maybe they hired a tow truck driver to do the dirty work. Or some guy with a plow attached to the front of his truck who could run it off the road into the empty snowy lot.

And I drank a Coke Zero, relished my aspartame and wished it would go away. I am trying to distance myself.

On the way home I saw these intense fireball (or bolide) to the west. It was the best one I've ever seen. I watched again outside once I got home and it was nice and beautiful out. The moon is a little over half-full and so it's navy blue all around, but it's winter after all so I can identify lots of stars and they seem so familiar to me, still so close to home. Kinda makes it feel more like home here, at least because the stars are so similar. (Nothing beats driving at 3 a.m. across Nevada though, when there's no moon.)

Anyway, I have to get up way early to beat the bookstore rush and here I am in a cold house wasting time while the sky's probably already getting lighter and I haven't even got into bed yet.

Audio: Brand New | Mew (still)
Video: Open Season
Text: Rule of the Bone

My words of the day: exegesis, repudiate, iconoclastic

We've built our own sun

2007-01-04T00:46:00.000-08:00

So over the break I recorded a song of mine on Joey's equipment. It's one I wrote over a year ago, but I just thought it would be fun to get it down. Though I think I have to re-record the vocals cause I botched a line, but you may not notice. Check it out here:

We've built our own sun

Obviously it's called We've built our own sun. And while I'm at it, I may as well give a shout out to Box.net--a cool website that gives you free file hosting/storage, and that's where my song is for now. Sorry no streaming. Oh well.

Note that this might be reposted all over the place, so I apologize ahead of time if you see it more than once.

Deviance

2007-01-02T17:01:00.000-08:00

I had a good break. Guess I'll post a lot more about that later. But for now: I got a DeviantArt site. Check it out here:

http://mooncowboy.deviantart.com

Not much there yet that you haven't already seen.

Audio: Mew | And The Glass Handed Kites
Video: Night At The Museum
Text: Rule Of The Bone | Russell Banks

I ate an orange

2006-12-16T01:42:00.000-08:00

The stovetop glared an angry red and
smoke rose from burnt eggs
left under the burner last Saturday.
And the water growled low through bubbles
boiling upward until I filled my
Peet's mug.

I ate an orange, tore my
fingernails under its porous skin
and they smelled like citrus--
California citrus, grown ripe and shipped off
to us in the desert, so we too can
taste that summer.

Through the first
real December snow the night hazed
its yellow twilight, reflecting porchlights
and glowing streets across the settling
dust like shivering prison bars.
I took a sliver from the pale globe in my hand--
separated in chunks, stripped into orange-white triangles;
and its world fell apart--

but it was three a.m. and my feet were cold, even
in the black church socks I hated,
wore only for warmth, fearing cold. Fearing acts of
procrastination. That sour tang on my fingers.

And I pictured the black of tires six inches deep,
spinning small white whirlpools in the covered street,
wading through those drifts in the sleepless morning,
so quiet and calm--
California on my mind and in my mouth.

Malls

2006-12-10T15:32:00.000-08:00

I do not like malls. We went yesterday to get Jarom some post-fourth birthday pictures (he needs them!). Turns out that on a Saturday in Provo--three before Christmas--everyone else has the same idea. The stupid place is overcrowded with mostly faux-punks or -gangsters and moms doing Christmas shopping and (surprise) getting pictures done. Now I'm all for the punks, but hanging out at the mall? Come on, get a better idea. The mall is the least rebellious or inspiring place in the world. It's commercialized. It's fake; they exist everywhere, in the same form. The world can't get more disgusting than a mall.

Luckily there was no open appointment until 7 p.m., so we left.

Then later we went to Salt Lake to meet Bonny and Russ who came out. We stopped in Temple Square to see the Christmas light and that was a disaster. Sure, they're pretty. But there was the hugest crowd of people. You couldn't walk. You waited in line to walk. Again, something to be despised.

Now don't get me wrong--I don't hate the people. There is just something so unrealistic in doing these over-traditional and falsely-cultural routines that happen to gather round the holidays. All the lights--do we really care? Is that really beautiful? Maybe. But to wait in line for? And the shopping; all the shopping. And how people do the same thing year after year. Tradition is great. But are these traditions great? Are they even tradition or just following what you see others do and what you see on TV, and getting the newest holiday ads and hittin the sales, taking pictures on Santa Claus's lap, Santa Claus himself for god's sake.

But guess what--there's also something sweet about it all, about valuing your family and giving (and receiving), making people happy, wondering in lights and beauty--at least some sort of beauty--and so on. It's not all bad. It just doesn't strike me as something I always want or need.

Sorry about that--to myself and to anyone who might read. For whatever reason.

And now I'm home alone and it's raining and I'm boiling hot water to make chai so I can sit back on the couch and do more homework and listen to music that I love. And I'm happy.

Audio: Threes | Sparta
Video: Monster House
Text: Where Angels Fear to Tread | E.M. Forster

Unbrowning

2006-12-10T14:45:00.000-08:00

Those hills weren't so beautiful.
They know the truth.

Just tall tan grasses making waves with the wind,
sprawling over the round stepped foothills.
The land was too barren, too dead, too far.
Too unsculpted--these promised land hills.

Spring rains once made them green--shining green
like holly leaves--and in groups the cattle grazed.
But this is not farmland.
This is no orchard.

One-hundred feet from freeway,
stifling, choking emptiness--
Think of the need! Imagine the people, the roads,
the homes: so artfully built!

Perfect square monuments made with concrete and tar,
unsplintering faux-wood and petroleum-carpetry.
Now we have porchside overlooks, views of
the vast expanses of other porches.

Row upon row of dual garages,
eighth-acre backyards and two-inch lawns;
lined up with their patterned paint and streetlight aisles,
cul-de-sacs stained near the curb with drips of oil.

The crown of the city, they call it.
Because you breach the top of the highway, and
you see them: the homes--jewels in a crown--
alive and aparkling and further than those hills once were.

They are colorful;
they are not so brown;
they will never turn green.
The cows are gone.

This is beauty among the hills.
They know the truth.

The Fountain

2006-12-07T09:47:00.000-08:00

When I was back in Placerville for Thanksgiving break, I saw The Fountain. The movie was awesome. It was thought-provoking, had a nice theme, great visuals--amazing special effects, really, considering the budget (35M I think)--and terrific acting. I highly recommend. However, don't expect this sci-fi major blockbuster like it seems to be billed as. There's a bit of sci-fi. But to me there was more about the immortality of love, and a bit of how the psyche deals with loss and love, etc. And it's fun to tear it apart to see how it works and doesn't, and what it really means to the audience. Kudos, Danny Aronofsky.

I'll see it again. I hope it comes to the dollar movies here, because it's way worth it.

If I had written this about two days after I saw it, it would be twenty times longer. But since I'm writing this now, finally (delayed because life is crazy and busy right now, and I don't always allow myself time to write when I should--it comes more in blocks), it's very short.