I have layed in the stillness of thunderstorms and found nothing there but the churn of my liver, of organs unnamed and sly, and wept for the mystery of body.

Excerpt from a work in progress

IV.
You were eight or nine but definetley
not ten and didn't know that song was
about AIDS but not long afterward you
cried after watching Tom Hanks in
Philidephia, convinced you'd never
get to slow dance in a sailor suit.



V.
And everything seemed so mullioned then-
yellow colored and light, truthful, like the way
you saw your body and didn't see your body.

VI.
I have wasted away the best mind of my youth
for eight million cigarettes and books whose endings
I can never remember.

VII.
The same rock songs sounds different when the
way you used to listen to them has become obsolete.
I have become so many butts and the butt
of too many of my own jokes and can barely stand to
take it all too seriously

We're not too sure

My lungs feel like wet denim. Mishappen, heavy, and hard to carry around.
But they'll dry out, she said, licking the mess that was her popsicle.
He hated her for eating like a child, eating a child's food on the street.
Maybe, he said. But wet denim stays damp for so long.
Do you have to be so cryptic?
But of course, the creamsicle matched her dress, her sunglasses, her eyes, the shoes, the way light hits the high windows and the water and suffuses this neighboorhood with light.
John?
I don't know if it'll dry out, but why the hell do you have to be like that?
Like what? You're the one who's morbid.
No, I'm a realist. My lungs are weighing me down. You're the pastiche.
John- he began to walk away, hands curled in pockets like hedgehogs- John, you don't even know what that word means.
yes, but, I sound like I do, and you have creamsicle on your chin and no one can see your eyes so they're more inclined to trust me and my wet lungs then you and your.

After an abscence, you will contemplate coming back again

Muriel Rukeyser once opened a poem with:

"Then I began to say what I believe."


I am struggling with what to say, what to do. I am struggling to see myself as a writer at all anymore.

There is something to be said about being "deeply affected" or "being affected deeply".