Memory

     is  the birth of cool, it is rapture and ignominious spokesmanship unearthed. Packed into a slatted-wood crate, milking the obsession from cash-toting hands. Freeing itself from your bottom lip while life ticks itself away on a digital stock-exchange display. I am down and you are up, and you save pennies while I search for Chrysanthemums and vanilla-scented candles. Scent is my fifth grade spaceship,
     I hide it in my pocket and take it into the forest when the week is over. Adventure is the part of our story that's caught in between complaining about money and having clean sheets. Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Sunday my hands mend themselves back from bleach, their crevices cave under bright lights, I go to the garden strip and put dirt on my face, over my shoulders, and on my back. I make a altimeter from an alarm clock, and worry what will happen if your feet should ever touch the ground.
Relief
     is a sarcophagus, the satiny silk chrysalis I weave into invincibility. I make myself a small child with a demon-proof lair, no one comes in, not even you.  I see

     how drugs take out your heart and put you anew, fresh: orange, pink, ultramarine. A wave is a soft gesture for twilight, a slow walk among the greying statue towers, bliss extracted from person to person tedium. How you exclaim about **** music as if your temple home was unfocused by jazz or synth-electro.
     I forgot your room of quiet had no bells, no hope, and no notes of resolve. Tragedy was the desert of your six to sixteen, while I made an opus out of crystal glasses and Cran-Raspberry jars. Then it was the relief, Neptune's hands on your *******, red dots of ecstasy connecting you to a higher vibration. You felt it was time to start exercising. I didn't **** you for modifying your perception of color, degrading in a salt pool- I didn't own your ****** it was just a place I went into to write.
    
    Three years later. I was growing backward, I was sixteen, making you the muse in my doorway, a James Bond goddess unraveling my fingers on her silky skin, except your golden crown was really a turban of snakes, and instead of silk I was groveling underneath you. That was the sweat that Ryan Shultz said I garbled up into two pedestal doves, I aimed by eyes straight at the city of gold, and then inside me shucked out every piece of self-respect and vitrified my spirit, castrating my lips and my tongue for something to come to or come at, he said I lived under pointed stars and that lying isn't a good way to get over past phases of silence.

     A few days ago, it all game back to me, in a random series of songs on an iTunes playlist. One memory from an isolated beach outside a strawberry patch near Santa Cruz, a second, two hands cupped over the ears, my face closing in on her smoothed-out pink bottom lip on an over-exagerated car ride to the San Francisco airport, and the third was the mention of non-vegan banana cupcakes with cream cheese frosting, a birthday I celebrated several years earlier. All of them in the coda.
    
     Verse four unbelievable. It caught me straying from the next stressor at hand. What's next? I move my cold hands from a keyboard versing strange relapse of mind, or I tear out another page, whip across town, and peel stamps onto a postcard to send.
     They were all tails from a memory. A slowing ghost that cooed at me from far away, beating me up and down, pulling my eyes away from a scent I continually tried to remember.

They told me the only thing that could cure heartache was war, and since the war wouldn't take me I figure the only thing to do now is take up a life of crime. Gabriel Garcia Marquez says in Love in the Time of Cholera that the only cure for heartache is to find other hearts to break. Five years have passed and I still remember without fail the flint of a lighter, the squint of an eye, and the bell of your dress. I dream a dream each night, sweet variation of the story of you. It comes down to a letter sometimes, I go to the window well with a notebook and a pencil and I draft a sonnet, sometimes a verse, any form of an expression to idle the time it takes for me to find you. I know stars that haven't lived as long. The way I cupped my hands over your ears, the way rapture lived and loved, you kissing me in the shade of the palm trees up their on Notre Damen Ave. I know the curve of the Earth wrapped in the shades of the skin on your body. I live every day for the chance that I will meet you again.

angry men who do not know I do not have a dollar or a cig to spare. Ugly irrefutable contagion-handed howlers. Angry mischievous heathens that pantomime on 6:00a.m. sidewalk, Wicker Park gallow stop-sign, choreographed gutter-punk drunk walk. And of all he wants and could ever want splits down his gooey membrane brain in the outline of a noun shaped fragment of a clause, "Couldja spare 80¢ for the train," but of course I don't spare on the ellipsis or the period. Semi-colons I won't! My rubber-bottomed leather boots lash out, heavy scraping sounds trail this mirrored shadow half an angle behind me.

*****!! Blonde framed sunglasses from American Apparel, a gift from my sister in a folded Ray-Ban case is scattered on last nights bedroom floor, my girlfriend has certainly not noticed, the gloom-coated morning sun spray has not noticed; but I have unzipped a fissure in the ocular lens. My heart skips a beat. Her bedroom might as well have swallowed them whole. Now the house can halt and have the shade, swaying in Spring air in 10:22a.m. shadows. The aviator himself Howard Hughes would strike me with his 488 aircraft. Edwin Starr in his invincible sinister calypso of War would turn me round. I was sturdy as a rock until I began to forget my forgottens. These unknown unknowns I knew I needed. I'm over a quarter-century on to noon going nowhere- and quite blindly.

But then, still she could stand upright and find me. Her neck crooked, looking onward through the East, the gristly roots of rhubarb buried in her searching fingernails. She's threaded worse, and of course if I could just tell her- this is the kind of nursing which requires acute temperament and flexibility. I am thus on a journey to strike nonsense and fear from the idiotic vocabulary that put this nonsense in my head. Split through me like a butter knife into my apotropaic. Perhaps tar water could cure my ails. If not, certainly a sliver of vanilla would set me straight. Or if could just rain rain rain all day, then I'd make do without, but she is at school. My pistons are racked and nervous, and I'm not going anywhere but my rucksack stoop. I am camped in midwestern Spring soup. Fog, rain, and shade. The nightmare of day.

When my heart beats black inside my chest, and the days I have are filled with death, and the girls I know won't walk with me, then I have my choice in misery. All the birds have died, and the plains are dry, the skyscrapers aren't lit up at night, and the city's sound sounds like nothing, then I have my choice in suffering. People talk a lot, but they hardly speak, all their voices creak in the summer streets, everybody walks but they're not moving, I try to only observe but then I start screaming.

I ******* hate the way that you look at me, your skin's so ******* clean that it feels *****, your eyes move around but you're not seeing, the way I hurt each day but you say nothing. If I tried to leave you might be happy, so I sit and be and go out at night and cheat. I would break your heart, but it hardly beats. You're my walking dead, my darling zombie.

Each day is second rate, I bore so easily. It's like the day we met ended your pleasantry. I startle all the time, you seem so unaware. I chose you number one, you chose to not even care.

I caressed you once, and undressed you thrice, you abandoned me in the middle of the night. All the time I halved, you had your own account, of every thing we did, it wasn't the right amount. Now I hardly care about the drugs you're on. I'm quoting blasphemy out of every psalm. Even the words I write don't tell half of the truth, about the way I felt chasing after you.

In every one-word world, exotic spaces' gradual state of life proclaimed as a melon . As the urges to divide the pleasures of the infernal forth from the happiness which has closed in to the square-shaped restless less rolling boxes. And what the treat is if all of the souls from the cypress take the higher breaths of the shrew and belabor them unto the points of humanity, uncivilized humanity that is quite bountifully.

During this autumnal abscission where the alizarin and pallid arms and edges, crooked and afraid, steep in the sullied tatterdemalion and the mysophilia that emimart

Show me a ghetto and I'll show you a place
A place of struggle and pain
A place about people complain
A desert of hope and grace
The home of the weak
Clawing to make something
Struggling to become someone
Doing whatever they can
Carrying drugs and or a gun
The boys in the hood are always hard
One wrong step and they'll pull your card
Knowing nothing in life but to be legit
If you **** that up,  you dont mean ****

The day after I had to let you go,
It was windier than I've ever seen before.
It was as if Mother Nature thought
If she blew hard enough,
Your windy city and mine might just collide
So that you and I could be one
Once again.

This city breathes the blues
buried just under the skin
in the memory of cleaners
and slaughter

Here the gospel travels
from mouth to heart
and it offers comfort
as by-catch of the bottle

The center as a pacemaker
in an old and worn out body
is waiting for the final lines
from a song by Muddy Waters

"You ain't gonna trouble
poor me, anymore "