As Requested

Welcome, december. jackets and canvas and wet warmth running around the corner of the open door to leave us alone, emptied. that is coldness and there is no single file. whether windows are sneaking in light. and the music is a collection of unfocused noise.

you’re welcome, gross thin feeling of insomnia and the fatness of trying to eat it to sleep. getting emptier. my soft soaking lungs. i pick up phones and know what is left for me at the end of the day.

welcome clothes and furniture and one in the same shifting like rugs, like slippery floors, like socks with holes and cold heals that don’t stick, don’t suction. from the bed, to the floor, to the bed. to the dryer. maybe to hangers.

welcome to where my knees don’t knock, stopped creaking, and moan. where the city is a different kind of collection. and i get bigger, softer. nondescript. i come running to get back at you, prepositions. to repeat odes. to american bento. and garb. repetition, and mistakes thereof. tell me ‘too far’ and you know what i’m saying.

All the Time

All the time. All of it.

we celebrate the games we’ve played and we’ve played them well. We celebrate our celibacy. The first rented room is always the ruined kind. dead flying things, moths most likely, in the lights

face to the ground, roots under rocks, and looking at iron-nickel wondering if i could see its increased gravitation. i'm spending the last of my twenties making flash cards. this isn’t what matters to me, but what distracts me. i have broken down concrete concepts until they’re simple one liners. i use them now.

i put myself out there, in there, sweat into my hangover all over your bed.

Jared thinks in terms of Facebook status updates.

Jared is writing a series of self-help books:

“Jared Gains Perspective”

“Jared Works it Out”

“Jared Chooses His Own Adventure”

“Jared Busts Out a Low C in Choir”

“Jared Engages in Retail Therapy”

Ruled by thumb and the rule of

I wrote this after living in Portland for one year. Now with one year left, it seemed relevant, even if outdated.

my sweat, my sweatshirt, my underwear

my back/pack, rubber/bands, my joni mitchell.

my staples and paper clips and adjustment to the safety pins. my push. my otherwise undeleted. my senate hearings, my weird, my weirdos, my men.

my advice columns and personal ads, my online shopping, my casual encounter, my casual romance, my casual relationship. my restaurateur, food snobs, beloved std.

my music, my misses, my cavities and candy, grammar, work-ethic, and cripppling inhibition.

my intentional misspellings, forward slashes, and self-conscious back/lash. my making of name and losing of voice and operating of phone and paying of bills to budget to back/stroke, to guilt, to guile. my fast/food, my drinking, i throw up, my rack of ribs, my cough and cover.

my shelter, my education, my expense and experience, my jazz and soundtrack, background and brothers. my three sisters, my three sons, my bicycle and impending impotence.

Anywhere

You responded. Social networking sites have made us all think in terms of status updates. 2009 has ruined my writing and made any new poetry trite and forgettable. You think that’s perfect, but it makes sense. I added that to another list I’m not allowed to make.

Then I consider what’s relevant: current questions of great intrigue. Summer and sex are on everyone’s mind, and these questions have afforded me a certain amount of ridicule. To one close friend, my responses are pathetic. Another half-heartedly attempts to assuage my concern. Nobody cares about themselves more than themselves. I am smitten with me. I am the cutest couple.

And I depended on these same sights to see what mattered, to see where everyone was, at one moment. I found myself like the depicted insane in overacted old movies: pulling at hospital gowns, but only because I needed to see my shoulders, screaming slurs at no one, but blurry nurses and the potential for relief: the morphine drip. I didn’t want to seem a seeker, a term Jane had used in our last session. That was about the dentist and it seemed legitimate.

This was too played out, but I was 30 hours in without food or water and could only roll my eyes when she said “resident.” Then my nurse went on lunch and no one could find her or cared to come back to tell me. At some point, Jody was on the phone and I struggled to find the name of the hospital. I was anywhere.

There was an oblong rock rolling over in my stomach. I tried to sleep sitting up. I tried to drink water. I tried to look around, but everyone had work to do, work to go to, work to stay at and I had to keep my hand over my headache. I was anywhere, and I was the only one there, and barely so.

It's not always briliant. Sometimes it looks like this:

Genesis:

Here's where I stand, here's where I stand to affect a bigger change, and here, then is my change. Nothing revolves, repeats, or is that revolutionary. This is not my coffee shop, this is not my tide, this is not my nagging colon, this is not, simply.

Exodus - Exit Us:

This is not simply put, this is not some hole, or whole, or gaping completion or otherwise ineffective prefixes. Regardless, it could not then be youth, or even something comparably tender.

Through Chapter 15:

I keep reading without saying anything out loud and I keep writing for an equally silent audience. Today I said it comes from a different place than speaking. One does not substitute the other. They are not complimentary, parallel, or even paradoxical. I will say I don't want to say these things out loud, and through my cryptic writing, I have a very public way of working out something private, while keeping it private. Today I thought I was brilliant, and follow suit.

Turns out, I care.

I am anxious. I am anxious about school because I didn't spend any time being anxious about it before classes actually started.

I am anxious about Ross and how my family is going to cope with the current news. It's not what we originally thought, not nearly as bad, but it is something we weren't prepared for and somehow, it seems worse.

I drank a beer and it put me to sleep immediately. I woke up an hour later to too little too late, to text messages, to low blood sugar. I made couscous and tried to substitute almond milk for chicken broth because I didn't have chicken broth and water never seems to work. I ruined couscous. Can you imagine? I made stir-fry. It didn't turn out as wonderful as I had hoped, but I grated parmesan over it and somehow that saved it. Still, stir-fry hurts my stomach.

I am standing up on my own and writing to an invisible audience. Being unrelenting is lonely, but I think I must do it on purpose.

Guess where I was when I wrote this:

I am somewhere in between –

Ode to our drunk, coked/out “youth” in line for dirty bathrooms 

and the 30-year-old sophisticates still riding high on bicycles. 

I am fooled, I am foolish.

Through thick and through thin.

Lately all I can eat is spinach. Lately all I cannot be is a drunk. That is a lie. There are so many resolutions to be had, and all of them about me do not alleviate the confounding guilt I feel for attempting selfishness.

So I stick around, there is no new news.