Voluntary Insomnia.

But the rain will wash the snow away.

Forward. Fast.

It rained all weekend; cold, icy February rain and it broke your heart with every slam against the window. But when you stepped out this morning, the rains had washed the snow away, the streets lay barren--thick with gravel, but barren. It was light before you were even out of bed. Spring is not impossibly far away, after all.

I saw a picture of your house today, the view from your rooftop, all summer sunshine and lush green trees. The hesitation in my chest was but slight, I laughed and dared to hope for the impossible. You do not know yet how good we would be together. You do not know how much I would love your view and your streets; I would cherish them. I hope you can hear it, when I tell you.

It was light when I walked home from work today, too. I don't think I needed that hat pulled down so far. There was life left in me, and hope, and giggles. Spring is not impossibly far away. Life, is just around the corner.

Thumbs Held.

You had words, and ideas, lined up for miles. Had hours to yourself and no one to interrupt your restless meanderings, your impatient heart.

And then the inbox rang with the slightest tremor of potential, with just a morsel of hope, and your words stop dead in their tracks, quivering, unsure where to go.

I must bide my time now, wait for answers beyond my control, hold my tongue. I count the minutes, remind myself of realities, forgive myself the wasted words.

The puzzle pieces will fit, eventually. The picture may not look as you had planned. But it was never painting that was what you do. And the words will be waiting, till you've found them a home to grow.

Re:read

Belief & Technique
For Modern Prose
by Jack Kerouac
List of Essentials

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
4. Be in love with yr life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You're a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

Play. List.

she'd ash on the carpet
and slip me a pill
and she'd get me
pretty loaded on gin.

How I wish I had a Sylvia Plath.

But do you?

Polaroid Life

It was a long walk home, mostly uneventful, slushy sidewalks, all that new snow and it'll never be spring. People walked carefully in the slippery undulations of the streets, always staring anywhere but at each other. How gray this nation in February, how sad its people.

But at the edge of my vision, something moved. A young man, twenty maybe, it's so hard to tell these days, skinny legs and skinny pants, navy blue wool jacket, came running towards me, one hand in his pocket, causing the jacket to swing back and forth as he went. The other hand clutched a cigarette, and, as he ran, he took a deep drag, held his entire hand over his face, crossed the street, his breath came out like a great big puff of smoke, a locomotive racing through the industrial working city. He looked like a young Beatle running down the streets of London. For that brief second, I was watching a movie, I stepped straight into it and through it as he ran past. To wherever he was going, that was such a rush, that required him to smoke and run at once. In no time at all, it was over, he had gone.

But the feeling of little moments of magic, little breaks from reality, remained with me all night.

ific.

There's a nail above the kitchen door frame, I hadn't seen it before and suddenly it was there. Empty white wall, nail. It seemed to be lacking a clock hanging from it. I suppose in the back of my conscious mind, that's what a home looks like.

This apartment is no such thing.

Outside the kitchen window, snow flakes flurried upwards, sideways, great big flakes like magnified dandruff against the black black night, and all I could thing was how much it felt like I was looking into the swirl of a Dyson vacuum. You know, the kind with a big plastic container where everything flies around like a tornado. I felt like I was sitting inside an aquarium, looking out.

This empty apartment. These echoing rooms and half-eaten makeshift excuses for meals, this twisted unmade bed and sad air. This is no home.

But if it isn't beat, I don't know what is.