birch

I knew I had found my way home by the one tree I knew and loved. It still stood there on the top of the hill. Set against the greenness of the grass underneath, it looked dead but it was only winter that's all. When the snow fell, landed and collected on the ground it would come alive though, in the black and white beauty that black and white is. So vivid and dreamy and Burton like. I expected a wiry little man to merge from its bark, cause he lived there, in the tree. It would explain the 'aliveness' of the birch, it would explain how I was convinced it spoke to me, with wisdom and reassurance.

unison

So cyclical our lives. Ending where we begin. Beginning where we end. Dust particles float past, dusting the sunbeam passing through the window next to me. And what will become of the time and space we consumed? Will the irises and marigolds intensify their colors because we slumbered too long and it is the only way to get us to see? Yes, we have exploited our greatest resource; life itself. A small particle of hope is sold to us at the cost of our clarity, our clairvoyance, because all of us know on some level we have been deceived, particularly by ourselves. Trading passion and purpose for complacency. I know what I see yet I fall in line, not so unlike those I detest. I silenced myself just like the others, in self-doubt and self-criticism and the hellish pursuit of something that is not real.

In unison clothed in faded jeans I watch them trot off across cement patio blocks, so seemingly content and optimistic. How we survive the infiltration and yet succumb to bee stings I don't quite understand. The unknown manifested lyrically rather than accurately or sensibly. Maybe there is no point, no bottom line other than striking a chord, affecting a stifled and rigid brain, a lost and forgotten sense of purpose. Fleeting moments like dominoes setting into motion a chain reaction that knocks us all over.

scene

There were killer bees swarming on fallen honeycombs. A women swayed to the sounds of a dusty song echoing from the record player. She wore chiffon. She was sad. A cigarette in her hand sent smoke swirling to the ceiling in a pattern that outlined her life, twisted yet captivating. There was an old stinky couch with ugly flowers of red blood and deep purple. Twitching chicken carcasses lay next to the bloody stump where seconds earlier their heads had been chopped off. A swanky smell on the air of incest and torment. Honey, this isn't a place for pink dresses with lace trim. This is where people come to sin and no one asks why. The devil's house. A house of sacrilege.

bald man

He was extraordinary, this man, bald, short and unassuming. He shuffled along the street to and from, to and from. He was always alone, but always smiling.

her

A radio-static voice, high-pitched and brazen, tears through the stifled, fidgety moment. She wants to exit it, this second of impatience, this life of anxiety, but she doesn't know how. It seems impossible, that there is no sensible solution to the way she it. She wants to be more restricted yet she yearns to be unbridled. How can there be viscous and transparency all at once? Nothing makes sense and yet it is all so clear, however tragic, however magnificent, however unpredictable. She wishes someone would turn her inside out so at last her entrails could touch the ocean. Then, at last, she would know what if feels like to be outside herself. Today though, there are only the usual neurotic perfectionists and hateful admirers.

The tree in full view leans slightly to the left. One day it will lean until it lays and then there will be no more horizontal horizon, just the perpendicular crossing of what once seemed normal and safe. Everything it seems, intersects, at some point. Nothing runs parallel anymore, not even obliged race horses, collapsing, dying, bleeding from a rich man's boredom and insecurity. She can make no sense of it anymore. All she can do is watch and weep, silently, in obscurity, for all that crumbles.

beeps

Beeps and blobs. The ceiling fans spin and all rests upon the coveted social protocol of silence. Minds screaming here though I can tell. Still, yet motioning in our thoughts. What, where, when, who. Thinking, creating our reality. The sadness, the emotion not unlike the first snowflake falling outside. And always there is joy, however suppressed, however ignored, however stifled. Smiles concealed under evenness, the gold star of behaviors. It will break through though, it has to, it is the evolutionary response to destruction. Love is the steadfast warrior, unbeatable, invincible. The only thing to deliver us on.

drool

Weaving inwards, together, submerged into one another's subconscious. We are not separate. Merged, as one, but stretched and elongated across the universe. You are there, on a rock, across the ocean, someone I have never met and I am here in this chair, of wood, someone you have never met. We don't know but we know one another. We know each other beyond comprehension, beyond explanation. It is knowledge that has traveled on winds, on sunbeams, on the back of dragonflies to land on a particle of sand squished between my toes. We can't reach for it in times of loneliness and it is not ours to control yet it comforts us in ways we can't appreciate because that which we most rely upon is often that which occurs without our aid, without our sense, without our intelligence. We drool upon the feast of our weaknesses and regret what made it to be so.