5:48

I wanted to write as soon as I woke, to say something as I have no one to speak to, only living fur to put my hands against and long, useless hours of work. I have ridiculous words that are like stones in my palm and I have to be up before our star because I wanted to tell my lover that I had a dream about them, or that their spirit was with me in every image, sticking its fingerprints into my brain. I watched horror movies before I slept, but my mind was still my mind and it was left with its rolling trees stuck in the dirt, completely untouched. I am sometimes unsure if it is mine as those trees are too large for my age and I almost know that I have a home in the forest given to me by much older women.

I have believed that god's subconscious was a landscape in Russia. I have wanted tea sweetened with cherries and vodka out of a freezer during a snowstorm. I like cherries because they are interesting things that leave marks behind, like injured bodies.

It does not matter because I still woke telling myself to gather strength for life. I love winter because it has bold moments of beauty and imagination in its vacancy and the mind does better in the dark, where in sleep it has the animal's full attention. Good minds wants more than the audience of limbs.

5:26

Dream, October 16, 2013.

My best friend comes to visit me for my birthday and the entire ground is covered in snow (I was born in June). She pulls 60.00 out of her coat pocket and hands it to me -- I am reluctant to take it, but she pushes the money into my palm and closes my fingers. We drive to a nearby town for dinner and I can only see the world through the windshield, the car lights focused to the middle of the road; we are swerving through the yellow lines and the tree branches pushing into my vision are covered in ice. 

At dinner we are playing a game with arrows drawn on paper, although I cannot remember what it was because I was already drunk in my mind from the bottles of wine, blackberry and honey and something pink pouring down my friend's throat, visible through her skin. 

The bill comes to 60.00.

She drives me to my parent's home and I walk past my mother sleeping on the couch. I go to the computer and play a song on repeat, although I have never heard it before; I play it so loudly that the speakers crack and I dance until my bare feet hurt from the hardwood floors. I realize it is 10:40 in the morning and I have not slept. I look at the pines through the kitchen window and watch the snow fall; I panic because I can barely remember the night before, but I calm myself saying that it what happens when you keep pouring glasses of wine.

I go into a bedroom and start dancing to the song again. I only stop when my sister walks through the door because I am embarrassed to have her hear the music. 

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.