Everyone is looking over their shoulders at someone who is not looking at them. The rain is turning to snow in perfect knife crystals that a dancer from Mexico believes will scar her warm brown face. Trains are leaving from every city in the world, traveling on paths that move in circles and take them back to where they started. Such is the way of all things. Think of it! The water cycle, the cycle of life, the way one thing converts to another, the rhythm of falling in and out of love, of making love and making war, of holidays that every year mean more and less at the same time. Grass going to seed. Tattered books from second hand stores run by fervent old men. Classes that aren’t even worth the bullshit our tongues spin without thought. A literal paper trail, of paper flowers. Places that I shouldn’t be but am anyway. Away, or home, or the hookah bar, or in the basement of a friend who has long since stopped meaning anything she says to me, and now, I fear, vice versa. Whatever. Whatever. Whatever. It was all meant to be like this anyway: the frustration, the restlessness, the coffee shops, the strange exchange of eye contact, discussions about telepathy that only make garbled things more garbled still. (And yet, briefly, the feeling of knowing something.) Being told, so simply: stop. It’s good advice but yeah right. The angry purr of many things. Electronic things. Buses. Cell phones. Heart monitors. Alliances and wars spreading invisibly through the air, secret but not secret, and wireless internet is basically the same thing, but synthesized. Technology lies. Yes, you can fake confidence. You though, not me. I meant you specifically, not universally. Tu versus vous. French class is bull shit, too. I don’t know what I am doing with my life at all. The problem, depending on the situation, might be: I want to be your friend, not your student, or it could be: I want to be your student, not your friend. Or your teacher. Or... Your friend, not your enemy. Your enemy, not your friend. Your accomplice, not your competition. Your competition, not your accomplice. Your friend, not your lover. Your lover, not your friend.
There are animals that mimic plants and there are plants that mimic animals. There are a million undiscovered things. There are notes we can not hear. There are colors we can not see. There are things I will never know but grope for anyway. There are, there are, there are.

He says it and I think to write it down, but I don't. You do:

The Human Spirit Is At Stake.

I think it's funny, how you write in cursive. He thinks it's funny, how we remember what he says. The thing about mind control, for example, or the comparison between Athens 44 BC and 1990s rap culture. You think it's funny, how I always need something to do with my hands. I say you are better than me but I say it like a joke. You laugh, yeah right. But still, I think I meant it. Again: Whatever. Whatever. Whatever. The blind man knows where your friend is, somehow. (Telepathy,mind control, instinct, something intimate and visceral and inexplicable, that comes from the organ in which the stomach and the heart are one.) He says: Do you mind if I join you? Your friend says: Of course you can join me. They sit at a table together and smoke and say nothing, then everything, and then a third man comes. The third man says things like: "Walking is an art" and "I am going to fucking stab you in the eye," but of course he is smiling the whole time.
Later we tap dance to shake off the cold. It doesn't work but we don't stop because what else would we be doing, really?

I have neither destination nor agenda. I wander compulsively. At all hours, or for all hours. It's good. The rythum.
That too, a refrain.
So many.

So...College...
Sometimes my dorm is kind of a dangerous place in that everyone has a nerf gun and is very eager to shoot at you as you are walking innocently and unarmed down the hallway. As if that is not enough, everyone is in jui jitsu club and are all very eager to show you choke holds and awkward straddle-y ground fighting locks, especially if you are not in jui jitsu club, which I am not. The jui jitsu thing got to seeming a lot weirder when I read this article in the Daily Iowan about a West High alumni who jui jitsu-ed his favorite chess partner to death when they were both very drunk. On the plus side, however, I finally got around to visiting the Dollar Tree. None of the nerf guns there seemed worthwhile, but I did get a pretty sweet suction cup bow and arrow set and a plastic "BALListic" gun. I've never owned a toy guy before and it feels morally questionable, but on the other hand I think the primitive power of the bow and arrow set makes up for that. I should be on at least neutral ground, I think.
Also everyone is way old. By way old I actually just mean older than me. I always assume that everyone I know who lives in my dorm is a freshmen, but it turns out like half the girls are sophmores and like all the boys are juniors or seniors. I feel like that is very weird, but I guess what do I know? Anyway, it's kind of reassuring because at the beginning of the year they were all so tight so quickly and I thought they were just way better at making friends than me, but it turns out they already knew each other.
I have maybe three new friends total, or maybe like six, depending on how generous your definition of friend is. Or possibly zero, if you're feeling less charitable. Natasha is from San Diego orginaly and says things like "righteous" as if they are totally normal things to say. Her hobbies include and as far as I can tell are limited to: being vegan, being buddist, talking about being vegan, and talking about being buddist. Oh, and getting tattoos. She's real nice and she likes Masala a lot, so that's cool. Ian is from Illinois and Germany and Texas and New York. I'm actually pretty confused about that, but I haven't gotten around to asking yet. He's one of the only about five english majors that I've met. (The thing that sucks about everything right now is that my classes are mostly prereqs or required and thus are full of buisness majors, and economics majors, and accounting majors, and mostly just barhos barhos barhos.) I think he's also a theater major. He's possibly my favorite person ever. Oh, and my room mate; I think my room mate counts as a friend. She is Chinese but she grew up in Pella, which is a quaint little Dutch tulip town. She is sweet and cute and a really good artist, but sometimes it is stressful living with her because a) she's sort of like a five year old and she makes me feel like a big city kid and I have to be really careful about everything I say and b) everyone likes her more than me because she is Chinese and adorable. We talk about Totoro so much that sometimes if I hear anyone else say something about Totoro I want to run away screaming.
It's sort of weird being an art major if the thing you are good at is not drawing, because everyone assumes that it is. To make matters worse I am not bad enough at drawing that they assume I am good at something else, they just assume I am a passable but unexceptional 2D artist. Sometimes people compliment me about nervous doodles I do in the margins of my notebook when I can't deal with rhetoric class. It's nice but it makes me feel kind of dishonest, and I always end up saying something really stupid like, "Oh thanks, I don't think so, but yeah," and then it sounds even more like I am fishing for compliments, which I am not, but hey.
Also I spend so much time in the Java House that I have to switch between two locations to keep from creeping the barristas yet.
That's about it.

I hate every day that isn't Wednesday.
I guess Saturday is O.K, too.

Or this: You are reading this play that you won't shut up about. "There's this dream sequence," you say, "But it's not even a dream sequence. It's like being totally fucked up. It's very fucking philosophical, but surprisingly well pulled off."
I stare you down until you break down and summarize: "When you die you get to choose if you want to go to heaven or to hell. Everyone picks hell because hell is awesome, hell is like a party, hell is beer and sex and no one has to work or give a damn about anything. Hell is carnal, hell is instant gratification, hell is the best thing ever."
I ask you briefly about heaven. "Harps?" I inquire, suspicious.
"No. Yeah. I don't know; whatever. Anyway, the main character, Tanner or whatever, picks hell like everybody else, but it winds up he's completely miserable. Everything is totally meaningless. Nothing matters. Nothing is real. He says, fuck this shit, I'm going to heaven. Everyone tries to talk him out of it but he won't back down. This is bullshit, he says."
"What about you?" I ask, surprising both of us.
"What?"
"What would you pick, in that world, heaven or hell?"
Something in that moment, in your face and your voice and your hands catches me off guard. "I'd pick heaven," you say, gently, like you're confessing something. "I don't need pointless indulgences. Fuck that."
And then, even though you go on to say about blacking out and being afraid of the coming weekend and hating human inhibition more than anything, I feel (accurately or otherwise) that I understand something, suddenly. Something simple and straightforward but surprisingly scarce. That maybe, more than anything, it is the striving that matters. That when you say, "God, I always feel like such an asshole, but I honestly do try," that is the moment in which I am most in danger of falling love with you.

This was a while ago, but anyway, an old friend, whom we shall here refer to (why not?) as 'X' was driving me home, she turned on the CD player to Two-Headed Boy, and her and Y and Z immediately started singing along, and I did too without really noticing I was doing it. I was staring out the window and not looking at anyone (or anything, really) and I remember I was kind of on the verge of tears but I couldn't figure out why and I didn't want to have a conversation or make eye contact with anyone because I knew if I did I would actually start crying and someone would ask why and I wouldn't have an answer and it would be extremely fucking embaressing, and Y would be sympathetic but then later talk about "plees for attention" or something, with Z and X on the way to a party in the house of a girl who I've known since her pastel-pink preschool days. (If you're wondering, then that--the memories of this girl whining for more juice, of her tattling on me when I played in the jungle of dead trees that had newly been made off-limits-- was the main reason I didn't want to go with them. Also: tired, sick, fed up. But mostly the former.)

Everything was dark and still and Y was slipping into that almost-falcetto thing she does because she thinks she's a soprano, and X and Z were fading in and out and for some reason it seemed really funny to me that I knew all the words and they didn't. And half-way through, about, I stopped whisper-singing and was actually singing, and--this is stupid, but still-- I felt so incredibly deja-vued, like I could feel every moment that I'd ever heard Y singing and every moment that I'd ever been in a friend's car late at night, just little things, things you hardly even notice at the time but that accumulate secretly inside of you, like deposites of calcium, or things that show up later, like secondary sex traits, like vague scars whose origins you feel compelled to lie about. And then I was thinking how I was not going to see Y until who-knows-when. Thanksgiving? And I thought about her house being empty, except for her parents, who would sit in the living room, I imagined, looking at the photography books that her mother had shown me at the book store the day before. And there was a moment there, around 'melting and choking with her hands across her face' when we turned the corner onto the block that I have lived on since (exactly) the day I turned seven, when I just couldn't take it and I didn't even know what it was I couldn't take. And I was very close to saying, "Nevermind, nevermind, I'm coming with you." Because it felt like farewell. It felt a little too much like forever. And I thought, maybe I could go with them and it wouldn't be so bad--would be worth, even, the surreality, the clashing of the two worlds--, and we'd do stupid shit and fall asleep in someone's basement holding hands, and later I'd regret some of it, but it would still be worth it for that one moment of dizzy solidarity before the night closed its fists around us. And I was so thickly, sickly jealous of them, of their endless stories, of even their most discusting anecdotes, of (more than anything) the shere number of hours they have spent together between sundown and sunup.
But then we were in my driveway, and whatever. Because if I stopped to say I'm coming with you, I would have to stop to say it, and I knew that I would cry. So I got out of the car, and facing away from them I took the deepest breath I could and said Thank You, and said, Good Bye, and said, Call me when you're in town.

I waited until I heard them pull in, then out, of a neighbor's driveway to put on my shoes and slip out into the night, to wander as I always have when there is nothing else to do.
~~~~


That one song, on repeat for a while, the sun past and blacker and blacker than black, no reason to breath, blah blah blah, you know the words, know also the ins and outs of petty sins like internet journals. And here, alone in this new room in this new building, in this curious brick castle I hadn't noticed until this year, I am the cartoon wolf running off the edge of the cliff, looking down, only then noticing that I have run out of solid ground, only then falling. I am putting all my weight on my ghost-limb. I am tripping on a stair that isn't even there.

I miss you.

Fuck, I miss them.

It's sunny like Bézier today and this is insult to injury. It is possible I will never see them again for the rest of my life. Then again I might see them in less than two months, but, fuck.

Whoever knew that not being lonely could make you so lonely? It doesn't even make sense. I feel like I am constantly looking over my shoulder. Sooner or later I'm bound to trip on a seam in the concrete. Then maybe I'll wake up.

Fuck.

But you were young, and with this emptiness like you were meant to be a bird, but your bones had gotten bored made no wings. And this is why your sadness shows so starkly in your shoulder blades. They are dull, like nervous knives who have ground their gritted teeth to nothing. Someday, child, you will know the words that seashells say when the animals inside themselves have rotted away. But that has not yet come.

And I'll work this like a worry bead. Until my fingers make the edges smooth. Like glass that knows the sea.

Dear friends,

Okay, okay, I've got it all figured it out.
What it is, is this: it's springtime, so I can ride my bike by the river. At night, there is a crescent moon and just one star. The sky, you see, looks exactly like it did that night in Greece. It was the fourth of July, in fact. Did you know that? Well, it was. Only it didn't mean anything over there. What was America, anyway? Thank god. No patriotic jargon, just cloying heat and the green of the ocean. Only of course I missed the fireworks. How can you not miss the fireworks? The fourth of july does not mean America, it means crickets and friends and sparkling drinks and homemade ice cream and fireflies and fireworks and every other form of gussied-up fire there is.
So it was the fourth of July and I was on the island of Crete and in the sky was a crescent moon and just one star. Simple, like that. Pure. We were on a little train. Not a real a train, a kind of tourist kitsch fake train that wended its way through little moutainside villages, practically crossing through people's backyards and generally making you feel a little bit guilty. But you felt good too, because the wind, because the simple of the sky.
And then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, for no reason that I knew: fireworks. Right up there against the moon and the star. Green and red. Quickly fading starburts and muted thunder. Then horror movie clouds made of smoke, and more fireworks.
The coincidence of it all!
The way that I could feel the ocean hitting every shore in the whole world.
And I'll tell you another thing: I thought, and still think, that if I could have kept an impossible promise, it would have turned out differently. How the hell do you catch a firework and put it in a glass bottle? I thought maybe I could rig something up with Christmas tree lights. I swear to god I tried. And you forgot about the whole thing by the next morning, I'm sure, but it's odd, the things that one remembers.
What else?
You guys, I could be hours and hours away from you in less than two years. It sounds fucking crazy, doesn't it? There are schools in Quebec and in Colorado that I might go to. That I really might. I might go where when the sun sets it turns the moutains red, or where it sparkles across the never ending snow. I could be so far away. But this is the only home I ever known. I love this city. I love you guys. I won't forget, did you know that? I will probably still be trying to put a firework in a bottle when I am twenty one in an unimaginably shitty dorm room at some school I've never even heard of. And I will visit you and I will bring you things, crow feathers and picture books about dragons, seashells from beaches. And you know, we'll never grow old, because we'll always be just who we are now, because I'll always love you.
I can follow my train of thought, but I bet you can't and I don't blame you.
People I love have a tendency to stop speaking to and looking at me without warning or explination.
You go cold like a star when you die.
We're all the same stuff as star dust, anyway; it's funny how things get recycled.
So here's the thing.
I've been angry and I've been sad and I've been bitter and I've been jaded and I've been afraid, but I've also been absolutely dilirous with joy. Everything feels pretty bad for a while, but then suddenly you are on a fake train in Greece and there are fireworks and a simple sky, and none of the rest of it matters. What I am going to tell you is this: it is springtime. Look. Look at the green. Green is the best color in the whole world. That's what I think when it's springtime. And it's springtime now.
The city is so sweet, young, green. And now I can ride my bike by the river.

Sometimes, times catches up to you and it all hits you at once: the grapes grown wild in the garden, the wooden castle, the chlorine, the mandolin music, the hotel windowsills, the japenese soda, the fireflies, the belltower, the wonderful tacky band tee-shirts, the knee socks.
So nostalgic it might kill me.
The summer can't come fast enough. I want them back. I want them all back. The ones who don't remember me, I want back most of all.

From time to time I wonder whether or not I'm talking to myself. Now is one of them. I don't mind, though, either way. Just curious.

The ice makes the world into not-our-world, into an alien world. But it is beautiful, so beautiful. The glass trees and the crystal blades of glass everything glittering so hard it hurts your eyes.

Certain things can save you,always: the quiet of a pencil, the suppleness of cloth.

(First of all, I apologize in advance.)

The springtime means Shakespeare and crocus flowers and fuchia crabapple blossoms, means poetry and fake duels with fake cardboard swords on the front lawn of the school. Always.
And outside the world is waking up, blue and blushing.

So, though I hold loyal to the snow, I can't help this. Really, it's inevitable. An ingrained habit. This is the worst of times, the best of times, the time when my father's eyes are brightest and his fingers on his keyboard the fastest, the time when I most wish that I had taken after him and been a poet, instead of taking after maybe my mother or maybe just myself and fallen wholly in love with prose.

And now, for no other reason than the inevitability of Death, Taxes, and Springtime:

~
“The Day the Phoenix is Born”

There are crescents of midnight
Under your eyes
As you drink Sandy coffee
And miss the sunrise.

There is more you meant to do
Than this book of Sudoku
Whose loose, buoyed pages
Have nothing left for you.

There are bent rays of light
Turning red with the night
As you lay down your pencil--
And miss Firebird’s flight.

~
“Mudriver Music”

The day starts early,
Before the sun does.
Then, slowly,
The sky paints each of sixteen windows
A different part of the same rainbow.
By nine I have done nothing,
By noon little still.
The day doesn’t really begin,
Until so to the moon.
Then,slowly,
The violinists play,
Their hands spinning fibers
Of music and wire.
And on the green slopes I listen
For the first birds to sing.

~
The Pear

First, you stand and stare,
head back, neck smooth and bare,
hands curled to fit the contours of your hips,
your eyes narrowed and watering against
the rush of blue morning light.
You see, muddled by mumbling leaves,
a jigsaw piece of freckled golden skin.
so like your brother’s, your friend’s, your sister’s skin—
but not quite so sweet.
Then suddenly the wind works in your favor,
the leaves blow back,
and you can see the whole pear, now,
Familiar: smooth and bare.
The bark is chalky, you discover, as you climb-
loose, crumbling, rocky.
The leaves shift and mumble, make you muddled,
A jigsaw piece of freckled golden skin.

~
“East-West”

The isles are tight and crowd
With packages which display
Fish I have never seen,
Fruits I will never hold.
I wonder what a lychee nut tastes like
What Hello Kitty tastes like--
And reach for an undulating glass bottle
Of melon soda instead.

~

(This one is not my fault. It was for a class. An evil, evil class. The sort where the teacher has you write skits about someone attempting suicide. The kind taught by the yoda-quoting tie-wearing faux-english-prep-boy teachers who are afraid of adverbs. The kind taught by the teacher who shows you two creepy dark sci-fi paintings entitled “The Island of Death” and “Atomic Children” and makes you write poems about them. So. The thing you are wondering: why I am including this at all? I like the first two sentence. That’s all.)

“The Island of Death”

In the touch of her hand,
There are moth wings and dust
In the sheen on her lips,
There is filigree rust
In the sweat on her brow,
There is not half a chance,
In the blue window glass
Muted silhouettes dance.
In the still of the air
There is the lull of her breath
In her dull hazel eyes
Are there towers of gold--
Or an island of death?

Do you remember any of it?

Anything at all?

Just a hint. Just a whipser. Just one morning's rainbow colored sky.

I hope so.

I doubt it.

I think the only thing I really want right now is Jack's porch. His guitar in the backround and his perfect scratchy smoker's voice, rounded and lilting with wine. And Dinease's tinkerbell laugh and tiny feet in bright, bright slippers. And their one-eyed cat rubbing incessantly up against my leg, i's frame so fragile that I'm afraid it will blow away on a breeze. And maybe Grahm, too, appearing out of nowhere with a newer guitar and a smoother voice, but still one that tastes vaugely of wine, noisily making ovaltine and volenteering to watch Jaws with Chandler and I, halfway out of kindness and halfway out of not wanting to watch it by himself. And Jaws. And ovaltine. God. I get so homesick for that place, so fucking homesick. So hollow and lonely and stretched thin with lounging for the chaos of London Ontario and the cold gray waves of Lake Heron, and all of it, all of it. I will maybe someday miss Iowa City like I miss that place, but I'm not sure. I love Iowa City intensely, I love it so much about it; I love, love, love our city--and yet I'm not sure I will ever feel more homesick then I do right now. I have never even lived up there but that doesn't matter. I am so hemmed in by cornfields.

I think the only thing I really want is Jack's porch. His guitar in the backround and his perfect scratchy smoker's voice, rounded and lilting with whine. And Dinease's tinkerbell laugh and tiny feet in bright, bright slippers, and their one-eyed cat rubbing incessantly up agianst my leg, it's frame so fragile that I'm afraid it will blow away on a breeze. And maybe Grahm, too, appearing out of nowhere with a newer guitar and a smoother voice, noisily making ovaltine and volenteering to watch Jaws with Chandler and I, halfway out of kindness and halfway out of not wanting to watch it by himself. And Jaws. And ovaltine. God. I get so homesick for that place, so fucking homesick. So hollow and lonely and stretched thin with lounging for the chaos of London Ontario and the cold gray waves of Lake Heron, and all of it, all of it. I will maybe someday miss Iowa City like I miss that place, but I'm not sure. I'm not sure I will ever feel more homesick then I do right now.