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. 

9:08

I found a ghost under the bed that looked like me as a child.
She was crying, fluid shining on her round face, holding a stuffed animal that had fallen apart while being washed in my past, her future. My childhood cat was curled near her soft stomach and I held my breath looking at his fur and when I reached towards him he growled and scratched my palm, trying to keep my skin away from the little ghost. I could smell the dirt of where he is buried in my parent’s yard. 

"Who are you?" she asked.
"I think I am you."
"Then why aren’t your eyes blue?"
"They changed color when I grew."

She stared at me, her long curly hair sea-waving over her shoulders.

"Are you a boy or a girl?"
"I don’t know."
"Eyes do not change color. Girls do not have yellow in their eyes."
"I think I became an animal after I watched an animal die."
"Where is your hair?"
"I wrapped it around my brain to keep it from breaking."
"Why aren’t your eyes blue?"
"They changed color when I grew."

I heard the snapping of her bones as they lengthened into my body and our cat chased the insects crawling out of his mouth while the noises of birds came from the morning and the lining of his stomach, which was slowly becoming grass. She screamed and I covered my ears while her face lengthened, her teeth falling on the hardwood floor, clacking like marbles. Her hair gathered around her fingers in circles and mice that came out of the cat’s ribs gathered it to build nests in the walls, where they died years ago. 

I looked at myself as I am now underneath my bed, the long arms and tattoos, wearing my lover’s ring. Her eyes were lighter, clearer, a resolute shade of blue.

I watched myself shake, the soft jaw trying to push from beneath the skin.

"There is someone on the mattress pretending to be me," she said. 
"How do I know who is who?"
"Her eyes are no longer blue."

I crawled closer to her so that she could recognize the lines of our face.

"They changed color when I grew."

7:28

I walked outside this morning with coffee and my aching breasts and I stood with the cat in what is left of the garden and our bodies were pink from the September sun and I immediately understood why he cried for me to come outside and rest my feet in the rain-dirt. I felt everything there, everything alive and calm. The words were coming up through the skin on my fingers and they were not much different than my veins although they were dark and scripted, but tubes that carry blood can change color with different limbs and my body could have broken its bones while I stood there (perhaps I was the cat or one of the birds) and the words were nothing more than flesh and biology, the cat's strong voice a pentameter, as language is the same as dead leaves and the beauty of the upcoming winter, where my culture decorates the frozen soil with artificial light.

There are crows and ravens in the pines near where I sleep and I want to look like them, their long black bodies and deep songs, every part of them spread out over the break in color where the tops of trees lose their density, like smudged, breathing paint, paint that moves and glides, aerodynamic oils, large invisible hands with magnets moving pieces of metal like a child's toy.



Life is obscene in the sense that it is excessive and that is why I feel words have to layer words until they are too sweet, running over the edges of a sentence, decaying your teeth. Writing is the most anarchistic art form because it requires no formal training, no callouses on the hands from years of holding a horsehair bow. I feel that communication through beauty is my only prerequisite and I love the obesity of paragraphs, the icing of adverbs and alliteration that crawl acid up your throat after you finish reading the work because you are too full, exhausted, your organs and blood full of sugar.

12:29

I told the person I love last night that my chest and bones are full of them. I am not scared to admit that I feel them in my eyes, which are watery, aging, and exhausted. My eyes, once blue, now green gray yellow and brown, eyes that mean nothing: muscles, blood vessels, a nerve, and jelly. Three coats encompassing three transparent structures, poetry, soul, illness. A conscious sense organ. Words that mean nothing, like my heterochromia, these words that are confusing you because they are my personal language that I am using to translate all of the parts of me which communicate with their own voices: ribs with expansion, liver with detoxification and protein synthesis, a subconscious with movie reels, the blood that bathes every organ in my frame. All of my organs have a say in the story of my limbs because they whisper to me while I sleep that they are autonomous, self-contained, and one said that if a surgeon searched through the upper left of my small intestines that they would find the bones of animals I once ate, etched with runes, resilient to acid.

7:25

I sat with my friend while they spoke about themselves and their soul, high on the edge of the road, listening to the traffic below us and the animals around us, my fingers tapping against the sidewalk because my legs were hanging sixty feet above the ground and I am terrified of heights, but I tried to listen with the early September night wind in my skin and ears. 

They asked me what I had dreamed and I told them about the burning trees and old apartments where I walked inside my bedroom to find it covered in grass and moss, mice moving through my mattress.

I asked them about nighttime-thoughts and they only told me about their broken heart.

"Why do you write of horror?" they asked.

"Why are your eyes blue?" I replied.

"I feel heavy metal around my neck," they said. "I am trying to crack it from my body, but my flesh-fingers are not strong enough. I have to learn alchemy to melt the silver and gold."

"I do not see my mind as an organ," I said. "It is electric, dark water, full of sea plants and amphibians; if you cup your palms and drink, you see visions from the mold growing off of the feathers of drowned angels."

"Why do you write of horror?" they asked.

"Because I have too much love," I replied.

"Love is not horror!"

"Then your heart has barely been broken."

I tried to tell them that even when the leaves were becoming ash in my dreams that a young boy helped me save the branches. I gave them memories of Los Angeles, standing in an old black coat beneath of neon sign, alone and my skin cracked like fins from the January ocean and watching the blinking green-glow and laughing to no one, because there was no one to laugh to but myself and god and friends on a different coast of the continent. I told them how I sat on the roof of my car and drank gin from a bottle and stole food for a homeless dog that rested beside me that night, watching the sun roll up the Pacific.

"Why do you write of horror?"

"To break free of slavery you have to disgust your masters."

"That is not an answer."

"I want to be able to truly kiss my lover."

I kept my back to the ground after they left, letting the insects crawl into my clothes to be next to the songs of Solomon that have survived thousands of years, in my blood and in theirs, the words of ancient people falling asleep together in silence, listening to the mechanical rhythm of the cars below.

10:53

I have had to live with all of the time and experience of this past week inside of me and now my body is swollen; I touch my skin and water moves through the organic fabric and it stays over the muscle like damp paper, my tattoos stretching into bruises. My ears feel clouded with fluid but I hear every sound. I am inside-out. I recognize everything.

I continue to drink, cups next to my bed, green glass bottles all over my bedroom floor and I have to walk on them, my arms outstretched, balancing as they roll and shatter, pieces of whatever is left over stuck in my feet and the marks on my thighs. I have kaleidoscope soles now and when I sit in the sun I can stretch my arches and toes and compare the color of shrapnel (some are clear, others opaque from the bridges of cell growth), which is like reading the future and the past together, as if I had gone back to create my own life.

I map my face in the same manner, the lines around the cheekbones from starvation, the scars on my chin from an empty stomach. I have tried to pull of the expressions, but they are attached to the nerves and my body rejected different cartilage, even the black and peach powders, which rolled off of my soft jaw with the liquid that was already gathering inside of me before I knew what it was, blaming my river-body on the heat and sweat. I can feel the bacteria in my abdomen and the beginnings of bones. Only my lips stay static because they have remembered you, even if we have just met.

I have more to give you but the water is still leaking out of the source into my chest, its own mouth like a cervix, dumping out mucous and blood. I am horrified to see myself cut open and only find organs and a spine as I know the worlds in my capillaries, the cocoons that look like marrow, the foxes that crawl out of my liver, the apples and sugar and genderless criminals hanging from my neck. There is a surface with the microscopic, fertilized egg sharing its space that can create life or rupture a fallopian tube.

I want to write prayers to emotion, because that must be what exists once the limbs decompose, and in my mind gravity and mathematics and animals and heaven are made of the matter of feeling, the force behind full connection.

3:15

A psychic once asked me what I was fighting against, and I could not really answer her with honesty, but I gave her some part-truth and she accepted it while blinking her eyes. I realized today (which is the past, which feels like early-fall) that I am trying to tear away from myself, from my limbs, which feel too fleshy for what is inside, which I know is more than tendons and blood -- blood, which should have a powerful plural as it can come out of my skin and eyes, and I see its blue-purple shine in my veins that are thinner than my own fingers, and perhaps yours (I do not know as you have not touched me). All of the things I have called hell are inside of me, wanting my attention. I may never have children but I am already a parent to those images and if I ignore them, they come to me while I am sleeping, like infants, and I give them space. I can be gentle to evil because I sometimes feel that all of human loneliness is radiation from god's abandonment of the angels.

I tried to read William Blake yesterday morning but he gives me too much space and the sexual texture of his work is like speaking to god when you cum, but without the physical expression I shook until I thought about him/her. I do not understand why drugs are necessary when there are organs close to your palms which have a natural direction towards un-reality, a communion to the outside of yourself where you can connect to the very ancient of our species, which is the same as writing your name on the water.

I am not feeling much because I am full of practicality, scared to know what I am and why Rabia cried. I want to cover my head and go to Japan and have books of my own work and the work of others on my arms and legs and coming through my eyes and sometimes my mouth (although only my truth should fill my lips when they thin with age) but I know the need for a straight mind so I wear simple diamonds and sapphires--part of the poetry of earth--instead of the spines of deer.



I need to rest again and pour water into my body and over my head until there is not another sound and I notice myself.