...no qualms at the heat and loneliness of May...

Sometimes your mouth is so dry from late-nite drinks and smokes that the early-morning drinks and smokes just rake down your throat and nose and the cold glass of water is just an afterthought to the glory of your desert lungs, it all reminds me I'm alive, and I bask in the solitude and luxury of not having to speak a single word aloud to any-fucking-one, all who yet slumber, and the morning is mine alone, I crow a silent crow and pretend my dry throat is a blessing.

A dirty spoon on a sun-baked front porch, black with crawling ants chipping away at food residue with their tiny black jaws, this image replays over and over as representative of my time spent in Springfield this last month, though its meaning unclear it makes me feel a hot crawling. It was a month of surprise at my own ambivalence towards surprise, punctuated only by a time or two by mania conquering reasonable will. I cooked myself like a lizard, found God in the blessed and occasional press of lip to hip, in the cool creeks and scummed swimming pools and happily dumbfounded Me on my birthday, pretending not to be in love with Her and It and All and the sun rolling outside the window while I giggled and drank passenger seat beer and promptly forgot to remember to pretend. Lips loosened and sun reddened my skin and muddied my legs and I rolled my eyes (metaphorically) up into my pickled and sunburnt brain and promised to write all sorts of love poems and run-on sentences and to begin my bout of monthly vow recitation to ears who only pretended not to hear a stupid word my tongue scratches on paper with a green marker.

No complaints, no qualms at the heat and loneliness of May in the Ozarks. I feel fortunate and grateful for my minuscule burdens, for my heart's yoke and my tanned humility. The year is laid before me, boiling and snowing and whispering sexy in my ear all sorts of dirty promises and angelic lies that I take, all of 'em, at face value. I'll see the Atlantic soon enough, and be reminded of our freedom as rubber rubs road and we hum with violence and passion and refuse to show mercy in either or any exploit, like singing to trees as we fell them, like kissing the tears away that you yourself strangle out of her undeserving.

I used to write so much, and I wonder now if it was because I had nothing to say. I'm older now, twenty-seven yesterday, and it feels like as my heart and mind burst and flower it would be trite to attempt to form my exquisite delights and delicious delirious pain into any semblance of readable and orderly trash. Maybe I'll start writing poems instead. My life no longer feels like prose, but rather arrhythmic skipping of stones tumbling from eyes to ears, tasting of blood and dry grass. O Lord, thank You for my afflictions.

6-9-11