The fish are lucky, they can cross at any time...

Pigeons. And a presumed mother and child. Bobbing their heads and walking in silent circles. The sirens blaze constantly and I will be conditioned to smile at the sound before I leave and depart. The Arno to my right, the Piazza de Michelangelo to the Eastish. Enjoy a pizze made my way like Burger King couldnt believe. Witness to the immortal skill of Michelangelo, Donatello and company. First on screen then live in person, always the best way to witness plumage. Park seating, scooters birds breezes and the gushing Arno river completely suround me. I want to cry. I want to cry and smile. This is all I could ask for, minus some sympathetic female company. But "if onlys" are a waste of a perfectly grand situation. I could be just stirring awake. I could be considering what I'd like for breakfast before my abnormal psychology. I could be going "damn, If only I coulda made it to Florence" Look at me now! Even my bad days here are better than good days at Chester.

Celebration and Agony

this is for harper: thoughts

amidst the moving motions of dusty tomes from the back to the front of the library i thought of you; partly because the books are heavy and i'll eb honest i could use the help but i think it was also the lack of presence of friendly competition and confidations - my life is much emptier without you, frankly.

somewhere under meditarian skies and mediteranean waters and meditteranean breaths of life i hope you find yourself reasoning up in clouds and under the earth with the worms and the real, stone things that find themselves to be tangible and knowable like the world we don't see around us

on the boot. when you are there, take a moment and contact the satellite men and make sure you peer down at your house and then also check where you are standing to see if you can catch a flash of hair or eyes because maybe from space you'll see somethign you never noticed before

i hope you brought shoes- i have heard that streets don't bear walking but feet will try anyway

since you have been gone many things of happenning happened but i was not part of them so i didn't really see- they tell me that things are going on somewhere and that perhaps hearts have been stolen and souls lost and maybe fingers or knuckles were broken and fish swallowed whole into stomach acid and the beers and whiskies drunk and the oceans sunk under themselves in some kind of fibrations.

i am expecting you to be browner when you return.

i am expecting you to be someone i don't recognize.

i am expecting to be surprised by the way you step and the way you climb mountains.

i am expecting to be at the restaurant and order beer with you.

friends begets friends and i hope you find this truth when you are basking under suns and moons and you find yourself treading and maybe you will find hands and those sloping shoulders of italian beauty; maybe those eyes and shoulders will scuttle darkness- it'll be warmth out of holes and valleys.

(have fun =D)

the hang of things

so long has it been since Iàve broken down metaphorically along thise not blue pages of the webertet. Not even watching what Iàm typing , just like old times, typ os and all. the only difference is this fd up euro keyborad abd how my fingers are colder than usaul.
so how is the sorlk without me watching it_
where did the question mark go_
balls and a halfzors I say
alright the jacket ahs come off, and mayn it is cold now. blodd comes and floods it all away in waves. the detail is excruciatingly beautiful in every piece of art. the dome would be so easy to slide off of. the stiars so easy to stumble upon. it feelis like i defied death multiple times today, and it hasnt really changes how I see things in this light.
so I haer we cahn have pets at the chester now, and woot on that I spose, but Id wouldnt really want some other responsiblity while trying to balence school. zACs fish seemed a bit too much at times.
odd to think that life goes on faster when your not around to witness it.
life deathj change and all that semeritan stuff. I dont know what else could possibly happen while Im here. aht I f I return to the chester and find that no one cares that I was gone_ I know that nothing at biout the college has or will change while Im not there, but it wouold be nice if I randomly showed up before school let out and surprised everyone.
at least my family will miss me, and I them as well.
sometimes an animal would be nice to havein the aparment touhough, just to keep us all busy while weòàre not waiting for classes to continue. Iàts been hard to work photographically wiht all the rain here, but I imagine its been alot worse in the good ol NH. Anywho, Iàm off,

I suppose you could say Im outie,
like a bellybutton.

dear sir

i once wanted to be like you in the great cavernous way that your soul opened to the sun and the bronze of your lungs filled and reflected out, and you breathed copper and it went out and up and it was lighter than air. i wanted to see how many ways you could count to three, and maybe it was lisped, and maybe it was simple and something upwards sideways. i once wanted to climb inside you and pilot you like a helicopter and land you somehwere. maybe the azores. maybe in bolivia- i assume it still exists but the whole world seems ngfulfed nowadays who can be sure; where would we land if it didn't? what does the sky look like there?

i understand why you chose the curtained lantern fixtures and why wou ld you ; ; ; why w;;; why you didn't want to see the nature of the thing as it was the beast the wolf the cowardly lion *HARRUMPH* who would bite *HARRRUPH* and claw; why wo;;; why ou;;; why you chose snarling and why you chose seething.

i don't really watn to write a letter but the places it caould be sent are innumerable and think fi you were the one to recieve it? what you would think? what would you think? where you would go? i am unsure of the correct postivities or the refracted atomic imbalancies that one expereinces on a day to day basis but maybe this would make you feel happier maybe you would find a modicum fo completeion the delicacy of pure xistence

i breathe you buddha and hindu; tell me what you thin now

child

it's like he's dead. everything but his body in chicago is stagnant and i can't help but ache sometimes. what would you say if i told you i missed him? brush it off, it's life, it happens all the time.

is this what it would be like to lose a child? sometimes i'm afraid of having children because losing one would be too much. they say not to live your life in fear, but some days you can't help but dim the lights and pray.

you won't ever know i think these things, don't worry. you don't know i ever dream these things. i want to keep you safe so i keep my mouth shut.

balloons and brothers and water hot air sex pizza arrows lies.

Today I feel religious

Today is one of those days when I feel there HAS to be some sort of higher being or power that is responsible for all creation. Here's why

My grandmother passed away the other day, and I just got an email from my family telling me so. They requested that I spend a little time at the Florence Cathedral, the Duomo, and pay my regards to her memory. When I went, I was so overcome with emotion that I had to leave quickly. I went to a smaller church, one that has far fewer tourists and camera flashes, and did my mourning there. I havent cried in I dont know how long, but I broke down after I lit a candle for her at this church. I dont know how long I was there, but I felt like everything was dying, while at the same time, everything seemed more alive.

I wasnt surprised to get the news, but I was surprised as to how quickly it happened. She had developed Alzheimer's and it was basically going to eat her. But I was always under the impression that it was usually a long going disease. I'm thankful that neither my Grandmother, nor my Grandfather, had to endure such turmoil for long.

So anyway, this is why I believe in some higher being. The emotion I felt, the love and fear that arose over something that happened so far away, in another life, transformed me in that church. Such emotion doesnt happen by chance, by evolution, by a certain arrangements of cells, atoms and particles. I felt physically different when it hit me. Like I was on some sort of drug. every breath rose and crushed me, I lost feeling in my face and fingers. I just let this emotion wave over me. I felt like when I was praying for her and my family, that something was listening, whether it was my grandmother, God, whoever, SOMETHING was there with me.

I refuse to believe that theres a possibility that everything in this universe is just a result of chance. We are not just energy floating around purposelessly. I dont pretend that I know that purpose, but I advocate acknowledging that there is one somewhere, and our BEING, our feelings, are what will drive us towards that purpose.

One of the biggest things I've learned over the past year is that life comes and goes quickly, and you have to embrace change and try to learn from it. Change is inevitable. And you either have to live it, or live with it. My family has always felt pretty disconnected, and I hope if nothing else, Mammy's passing will bring as all a little closer, even if just for a short time.

Life means something. It has to.

promt: childhood smells

the orange sweater my mother wore always smelled of chemical developer, but i didn't know that until i got [to Chester College] but i buried my nose deep into that sweater engulfed and even now it is the most potent memory of my childhood

but i don't remember the way my father smelled, not as easily, but i remember in early mornings when i was as tall as the kitchen counter, before any one had showered or gotten dressed, that he had the sort of smell that made my nose wrinkle and my eyes water and now it reminds me of day-old sex, when i've slept it off without bothering to bathe and how the smell feels oily slick

i remember the smell of the crawlspace under the old house - it was built in the early 1800s and the guy who had built, a captain, a shipping company owner, had hidden a tray under the floorboards and a trapdoor through the dining room under the rug and there was still an old basket there, decaying, like the rest of the house, and it semlled like everything old - a decomposing hill of tomes and geriatric skin scrapings and of osil that hadn't seen rain in two hundred years and filled your lungs like grave dust if you breathed too deeply

i remember the old tree trunk that was taller than my brother and i him on my shoulders and how we would argue how tall it must've been (that was my favorite story mom and dad would tell, the night that they heard the terrific crash gunshot and they called the police - the officer asked if they lived on a dead end when he got there - my parents laughed no and when they were all outside on the street realized that a wall of bark and leaves ten feet tall had appeared at the top of the hill laying across the road, a huge oak that had been there when the algonquins were scraping stones) - i buried my nose into it and breathed natural

series individual.

gestalt: defined a configuration - organized field having specific properties that cannot be derived from the summation of its component parts: "THE UNIFIED WHOLE"

(an instance or example of such a unified whole)

The word came to mind in my pondering of ghazal, the poetical structurations of such arcane constructions - two lines two lines two lines (or three lines? or three lines three ines? a combination of the simple things)

since betraying the simple notions i have abandoned once and was and not and here the streaming knowledge bathes down.

"it's not that I'm jealous- I just don't like people touching my thins" - that's not mine, but it was around and now I've possessed it; such is the nature of experience and our consumption of it - after you consume this it can become yours and excrement or regurgitate or whatever it isyou wish.

i give a series individual thoughts and we pour and we pour like the rain

it takes one to draw connections between the distempered and the disconnected and i hope you have the coin and the pencil because i'm not buying lunch. In it's purset form the stream of consciousness is nonsense, or is it complete sense, when the mind grows the connections that we read on ceral box labels.

faithless faith falls false feelings fears falbes.

abrupt the end the snow the wind it brusn the chesks and they pale pink the blood spills through the the throat and burns and here the sun comes down to touch lips and here the moon comes down and here we lay together briefly.

europe is so far away

she rang in the new year with cupcakes and tears in the bathroom. there were lights and ex-lovers and she knows there are condoms tucked in his suitcase behind the boxers with the holes in them. europe is so far away and it's just that much louder that she has to scream. she'll go again someday, she knows she will, but doesn't know if this is the year for redemption.

the new calendar on her wall is all that's changed. it used to be lighthouses, now it's just plain white paper printed from the burlington public library. it's blank and she hasn't written anything in it because, damn, it's better to have nothing than a whole lot of something she hates. she can't write what she wants on a calendar. the nights she goes to the bars and talks with his ex, the night she goes to the movies alone and laughs into her popcorn.

she found out her father does coke and her mom's having an affair. its the new year.