new things i've seen but don't know what to say

Genealogically

Family tree make sense.

Ghosts, you've got to slow down

before we can draw your filmy anatomy

into the pencil portraits

hanging from the necks

of other great ancestors.

My Father's Mother

Did you dance those 1930's blues

while Bonnie and Clyde ran the trail through thirty-two

making hot chocolate and paying dues

and they quit when you were six, before you knew

my father would arrive doubled in Delaware in February, 1952

with a twin who looked too much like him

and nothing like your father, or their father, or his father, and so on.

You tried to teach them French when they were ten combined

like you tried to teach me to knit, but my hands were too small

and the needles didn't fit,

but you had Johnny Cash

and The Sound of Music

in your record collection so we kicked our feet in time

to "Lonesome Me," and your ankles were slim

and the pantyhose still had the seam

up the back.

this is what my paper has done to me

Murielle is petulant and I'm clairvoyant

addition: what i look like when i can't write a story to save my life.

the danger twins are playing our second show tomorrow.

i've been reading biographies by and about david crockett.

pretty sure electric owls are going to be on repeat for awhile.

i forgot to turn off the coffee pot when i left the house this morning.

but i remembered to catch the bus on time.

my fingers are sore from pressing guitar strings

but i think i can at least think and play at the same time now

still working on singing and playing simultaneously.

one of us has seen the light today

howl! boxcars boxcars boxcars.

Short Trip

"Honey, can you hand me the garlic press?" Suzanne points to the red utensil on the marbled green Formica, next to the kitchen sink and just out of her reach. Mike turns to look, looks past it and looks again where she's pointing.

"Thanks. How was work?" Suzanne presses garlic into the pan of chopped onions sizzling on the stove. Mike scratches the dark brown scruff around his chin and says, "fine. Tom Cooper got fired today."

Suzanne puts the garlic press down and begins to arrange the features on her face to express surprise tinged with sympathy. Once she has moved her eyebrows closer together, slanting them up at the ends, and tugged at the skin around the corners of her mouth to turn it down she says, "Oh, Mark that's terrible. What happened?"

started something new:

photos of myself wearing headphones in coffee shops. should be an easy project to follow through with since I am always drinking coffee and listening to music. i'll decide what the point is later, right now i'd like to illustrate my opinion of this double shot white coffee latte:

very questionable.

Friend and Sister: capitalized relationship transfer

My grandfather would cross to the other side of a street to avoid a race, and when my grandmother included an African-American woman in her stories and half-written novels, they were always "aunt" somebody or other; fat, jolly women, usually excellent cooks and supremely complacent at being drawn into a narrow, two-dimensional role.

we played a show
a living room sing along
I like it and I liked this:
folk people and folk tunes and cover songs and shiny tattoos
and i like liking these things in the generic, universal way

on the other hand,
your sense of timing is impeccable and insulting.
stop talking when you should be doing everything else.

get the chemicals in

i miss all of this.

sometimes i even miss color combinations making my eyes wet in midnight parking lots and late night typewriter flights and leaving things behind accidentally on purpose.

and i am glad that letter didn't stick around long enough to get torn in pieces.

Isabel Archer and Dorothea Brooke are slowly providing my earnest endeavors to be "really good" with protection, forming a framework of reference I need often. Their characteristics make me want to define myself as a follower of their theories, to do something wonderful accompanied by Scott Joplin's ragtime music and rain sounds on a tin roof while I dance inside.

and i just want to go home before everyone goes other places.

once again pullman is turning me rotten and bitter, and i can feel my insides going sour at night while my eyes are closed and i can't sleep. i want to go home.

historic highway cargo ship paradise

Historical Nervous

hysterical, my mother in the backyard when she realized what i'd done
(what i'd done) dug up cat bones in soggy buried shoe boxes
penitence is what we try to say on Sunday mornings with tongues too thick
and not enough grape juice in that tiny clear cup to tell full the sky:

sometimes ocean side and sometimes barely out of reach
and when i stay long enough sometimes the sea buried bride
walks down in the dark off the cliff, coming slow
and without her shoes which were swept away in twenty six seconds when:

thirteen whirlpool children look up with dry eyes, bed rock side
and while she watched the water babies began to make soft slow bubbles
metallic and solid until they woke up on the surface and whispered, "we're cold"
they took her left shoe first and she gave them her right ankle and dreamed:

if she rubbed each one between her palms long enough
decayed corpses could come back to breathe and lay quiet at night
inside slower spinning molecules and southern city heat,
drowsy and fed by the heat from full stomachs and satisfied:

hard wired for soft sounds

this is what i look like when i study (people) hardcore

this is who is in my headphones now all the time

this is what I did today

-made a shirt smaller

-finished a shirt-dress thing

-realized the source of everything wrong in the world might just be the greek system

-analyzed. myself and dracula.

-walked to campus and back 3 times. uphill both ways.

-caffeinated my blood

-did something on accident

-abstained

-remembered what Mary said to do with the broccoli in my fridge

-read a biography on salinger

-listened to Alkaline Trio on vinyl (self-titled)

-got super excited. twice. want to know why? here's why:

ONE: space party on saturday, in my old house on maple street. themed parties will never die; the aliens who take over the earth in two hundred years will have "so you think you look like a human?" parties, butchering fashions of the twenty-first century and unintentionally providing some kind of realistic commentary on the general extravagance of our future-extinct society.

TWO: say hi! no really, say hi! we are going to say hi! November 7th, i think, at Neumos in Seattle. It is a tiffany-birthday extravaganza event and the Danger Twins will be coming home to riot in full force on Capitol Hill.

Demons by default?

both the second and third floors of the old library were disturbed today, to a degree i'm not sure either of us will ever recover from. the inundation of frat boys with their cell phones was the closest thing to hell one can experience while still alive, not counting college hill. wait, college hill on a friday night. That surpasses Satan's hottest hellfire.

Last of ALL:

RADIO SHOW///KZUU 90.7

FRIDAYS 6-8 pm (stream it)

THIS FRIDAY: CORDUROY SHORTS IN STUDIO PERFORMANCE AND INTERVIEW!
The theme: short shorts and never nudes.

NEXT FRIDAY: INTERVIEW WITH KENNY FROM DAPHNE LOVES DERBY AND WOLFTRON!
The theme: Wolf to your mother: werewolves, seawolves and maybe patrick swayze.

dust dust dust boxcars in dirty streets

She takes her shoes off right away, loosens each heel with the other toe and kicks until one shoe lands almost in the water and the other next to and behind it, just a little, dusting itself with a light layer of heavy sand.

He leaves his shoes on and his hat, he's always wearing a hat she thinks from a sitting spot close to the water while she tests the temperature and turns her shoulders away from him.

They've brought the things they need:

blanket: she spreads it unevenly, folds in the fabric creating combinations of reds and blues meant to stay separate, but he dislikes discontinuity and she's about to sit down but he pulls the two edges toward him and her knees bend and the wrinkles disappear in ripples.

half-full bottle of old ezra, 101 proof: he pushes rocks and mud away from a small space in shallow water and places the bottle inside the space, wet up to the neck, and it sways like it hears a tune and wants to dance.

speaker: he eyes the position of the blanket, the bigger rocks and the smaller rocks, her sitting pale arms wrapped around bare legs, and he puts the speaker down behind her and to the right and takes his time choosing a song specific to the water melancholy and eroding banks.