there's a girl w/ cherry chapstick on and nothing more

wrote a choose your own adventure story across her body, then spent the rest of the night exploring the variations.

move to her knee if you found her laughing silently, uncontrollably in the pantry, clutching a bag of flour to her bare stomach.

move to the small of her back if you ran into her on the street. it had been a year since you'd seen her. as a way to say hello, you grabbed her waist and dipped her, kissing her roughly.

left for living

two maybe three hours into an acid trip, I wrote her a letter. by a letter, I of course mean a text message. it reads:

"I want to be naked w/ you, to feel your body, your life stretched along mine: I want to feel the breath from my lips to your ears, the distance so slight there's no fear of my words stumbling over their shuffling feet."

of course, I didn't send it. it has joined w/ all the other letters I've writter her.

some of them were actual letters--both hand and type-written--some of the letters were texts, or thoughts that kept w/ me for days + months, some were paintings, some poems, some were random little acts, a tilt of the head, a howl.

some of the letters were written in dinners I cooked for other people.

I am reminded of Kafka's letter to his father. never sent, just kept in a desk drawer, it was published after Kafka's death so everyone who wanted to could read it. except, of course, the person it was addressed to.

I want to compile the letters I've written you. let's say it was an even hundred. I want them in envelopes, each w/ your name written on it. your name, not any of the names I use when I write of you. I want them lined out in a grid on a wall so anyone who wants to can come and take a letter out, read it, and put it back.

I want to write your name on every brick, every stone I find.

I want to tell you I miss you. instead I'm going to get coffee.

I was in Portland, Ore for a couple nights. I had spent the first night drinking, from concert to bar to bar to afterbar, to someone's house where we opened bottles of wine and smoked on the owner's deck well after sunrise, to a time too obscene to be awake at. I was given three hours of sleep on the couch.

I cannot consider the evening morning; it's not a concept wholly to when I wake up. still, if I wake up after noon, it still feels like morning, but a morning stretched over something that can't be contained in its contours, in the walls I've built for it.

in the morning I pissed in the stranger's toilet, unsure if I should flush. washing my hands, I noticed condom wrappers in the garbage that weren't there the night before.

sometimes I feel, after having stayed up till past dawn, that the morning is having sex. that is, morning as it is attached to the clock; from dawn to ten a.m. the night is off of work and morning has nothing to do; the day will shoulder all its weight. morning and night move differently than we do, and it is hard to tell them apart as they do. and so--before I have gone to sleep--I will feel the morning in my stomach, as I feel the evening along my shoulders, but in the morning--after I have woken up, and I can never sleep for more than three or four hours on those nights--I will feel that it was nothing more than the evening, just working past sunrise.

took me an hour or more to find my way back to Portland. ate at a bakery a couple blocks from an apartment building some friends had lived at a year earlier, but they no longer lived there, or weren't home, or just wouldn't answer door or phone. went to powell's, killed time I never knew so felt no guilt for. rode a bus around city: having nothing no paper, I wrote a lonely sentence on a pack of matches.

found myself drinking, a friend bartending. smoked cigarettes, some girl, some woman, some friend of the bartender came and sat beside me. asked for a cigarette, for a match. said,

"where did you get these matches?"

"I don't know."

"have you read what's written inside? it's v. beautiful."

"I wrote that."

she left. 

the bartender drove me to an all night diner where I played Tom Waits Rain Dogs on jukebox over and over. the waitress drew comics inbetween tableside deliveries. the only other customers were drunk drag queens. it was so prosaic. when the max started running, I rode to the airport and slept on a bench. was only harrassed by cops once, asking if I had a home, telling them that that was where I was trying to get to.