Wrapping myself in old, faded photographs, newly retouched and brightened, like a flag, like a blanket warming in the chill emptiness of time.
Threadbare, worn, I find new stitching and follow the flow

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court in the sun on the lawn
Scully and the Tropicana cap
Snowball attack
The guilt associated with burning an ant with a magnifying glass
Ronald's dad, Evel Knevel and that motherfucking leather belt across our backs
Sunflowers
Showing Cheryl my weiner in 3rd grade
My mother dragging me to the car telling me that she's giving me up for adoption after CHeryl's sister tells my mom about the weiner incident
Cheryl kissing me on my 7th birthday
MS and the potato chip binge

Waking to your golden fields, too late for second chances,
clenching fists and eyes tightly shut, to preserve stolen glances,
etched into memory and found buried, as unsavory ivory carvings, the happenstance was horrific, but the deep result stains the present, and it cannot be transferred or sold, my little illicit idol in a land of no graven images.
I'll keep it, painful and troublesome as it may be. The currency that defines its value exists only in the countries of my heart, and while you are still legal tender here, counterfeiting is not a crime.

Delving into the long past with a scrutinizing eye

An accounting of the deep days of youth, a temporal, memorial and emotional sudoku; random moments defined by random moments and the challenge is to correlate, contextualize and find the defining strain that connects all points.

The odor of burnt hot dogs.
A campfire, tinfoil pouch, filled with vegetables and butter.
The Mighty Mouse bus
The computer and the red book with the black spine
The video camera that would be blinded by the light (Jennifer Clooney and I?)
Penny Baer for president.
The rooves and the nails and the falling
Chased by skeletons when taking out the trash
THE BULLDOZER and the moped
cinnamon toothpicks
erasers on skin
Dragonflies and rainbows


to be continued..

It's quickly approaching 4am and the open bedroom window beckons the sulking, staccato light from the mildly dysfunctional solitary streetlamp on the corner (with whom I half-halfheartedly commiserate; I'm feeling rather lonesome, dim and blinky myself, at the moment. You and me, Sr. Lamppost, poor us.). I am trapped in the waking world and visions of night's rest are but a bleak and tortured landscape.

O, deepest night, I pray you claim me before you've lost your grasp on the sky for the Sun is a brutal master, and while I will normally eagerly submit to its deliciously vicious lash, I fear to face that blazing flogging without a modicum of rest.

The rain's indecisive patter and the chill and moist wind come so close to lulling me into sweet beta wave machinations, but each moment I drift closer to my own internal, eternal sleep, I am jostled by deep rumblings of respiratory protest, screamed from tattered lungs, reflected by flooded sinuses, careening through the pulsing arch of pustular tonsils and tearing past lips worn from tissue's janitorial kiss.

Goddamned lungmonkeys. Tonight, you will have your way with me, but the morrow holds your suffering. Seriously. Tomorrow I Nyquil your asses back to the monolith.

Fondness makes the heart grow distant

Crazy

The worst curse is to be crazy and know it. It's not just watching the slow descent into madness, it's drowning in it, sucking it into your lungs, letting it overcome you, all the while, watching from a distance, the faithful observer, desperately scribbling in his journal, hoping to discover some clue as to how to out him out of the muck. But looking down at the paper, you realize that the pages are drenched and the ink is smudged because that drowning man is you. And you panic, and flail and sink even deeper. All the while, watching from a distance is the faithful observer, ad infinitum. Not even Ourobourus had it this bad.