12:48

Dream. October 5, 2013.

I wake on a couch and feel an ache in my back. I walk into a bathroom and pull up my shirt in front of a mirror -- I have scars across my shoulders, spine, and ribs, cuts still stitched and crossing over tattoos that I do not have. I search my skin until I am able to find a stab wound and with two fingers I pull the injury open and watch the blood gather in the fabric on the top of my jeans. My back is covered in a white medicine that I remember a Chinese man massaging into my while I rested. I rub some of the medicine into the wound and throw my stained shirt on the floor, falling back asleep on the couch.



I am still in the place where I woke but I needed to feel my dreams roll out of my abdomen before I put my fingers on plastic keys so that you could read my thoughts. I feel myself behind my skull with that weird ache that comes from lack of rest, the muscle-speak where my body folds itself into delusion, thinking that laziness is health. I moved my limbs and through the window I saw a male and female cardinal in what is left of the blackberry bush, swamped in the still green leaves, their feathers plump from the heavy water morning. I watched them search for food and move circularly, natural geometry. I drank coffee. I caught myself in the bedroom mirror, near my dried plants and bleached skulls, looking for scars across my shoulders. 

People used to believe that hares were able to change their sex during March. I have five months before I am allowed to lose myself.

All of this is no different than birds searching for food -- I am searching for the right thought, looking for the correct way to move myself around others. I feel frail because I feel I have used all of my strength to stay alive. Nothing is worse than the desire to love, true love, with its sacrifice and skin peeling, where being an animal loses its romanticism and your self is shown to your self, your osteoporotic mind that is dying because you will not eat, you will not eat, the desire to live is so severe that it is burning through your immateriality, because you are not strong enough to handle your own passion. 

I have no thoughts, just this unyielding, limitless expectation. I am exhausted from being human.

The feastday of St. Francis of Assisi, who preached to the birds, has passed. He was said to give sermons to the little people with their healing, hollow bones, but I feel that they told the saint of the christ in their vocal chords, the color of plumage, eggs, seeds, human hair in nests, and the stories passed down from cranes, who are the first creatures to greet the sun.

To speak to animals is to know all the secrets of god.



Dreams of violence on my shoulders, where the colored appendages were removed, my body filled with heavy, mammalian coal.