Midnight Poems

This slow-spread disinterest is poison, a plague. I'm bored by your vacuous eyes' empty gaze.
Dating a man, an arrogant one, is like touching the sky to be burnt by the sun.
I wanted you once---a vortex, a myst'ry---but here it is clear that you'll not truly see.
I wanted you once when I thought you were great, but seeing you now simply fills me with hate.
This slow-spread disinterest is contagious and spreads; to my eyes, to my lips, to detachment in bed. I'm bored by the touch I once wanted so much; I'm becoming contemptuous of all that was us.
Dating a man, an arrogant one, is like poison, like rapture completely undone.
I wanted you once when you then held my gaze, but your distant disinterest's an ineloquent haze.
The slow-spread of loss and your soft-shot impunity are chasms without even peaceful immunity. Dating a man, an arrogant one, is like chasing the clouds while wanting to run.

Canadian Geese Stories

It all began the year after the geese were lost. Wild enough to scour the skies far above humanity, but sentient enough to spread the first seeds of solemnity in the American West, the Canadian geese broke their V-formation in a floundering flurry of despair. After centuries-old migration patterns were disrupted by industrialization, the birds descended upon rooftops, scratching webbed feet and strong flight feathers against shingles and tar. I heard them calling to each other like neighborhood kids from doorsteps, adjacent positions on separate structures disquieting the flock. I thought they were sick, but the wetlands and waterways were paved over, so they were merely lost. We all were. I think the Canadian geese were the loudest in trying to tell us.

    The next year, the geese never left. Daily trips to and from golf courses and city parks were enough, since Utah’s winter warming seemed tropical. Would it be too late to migrate when the snows hit with great pillowy mounds blanketing cars and closing canyons too narrow to plow? No, the snows never fell; the sky never changed, and Utah remained in a constant state of bitter gray for more days than anyone could count; more days than anyone had ever seen.

    The joggers were happy enough throughout the thaw, circling outdoor running paths comfortably in shorts unsuitable for regular December temps. The ski industry and winter film festivals Salt Lake City’s economy relied upon collapsed while locals decorated Christmas trees with snowflake ornaments and watched children worriedly, fearful of the impending water-shortages across the valley. Maybe then the geese would finally leave us, when there were no grasses to graze near man-made ponds. Perhaps, when the geese go it will be permanent at last. With migratory patterns distorted beyond repair, the geese might not ever find their way back. Maybe they’ll never try.

Online Persona Unsolicited

I recently signed up for Flavors.me and scrutinized my font, domain name and page design for so long I neglected going to the gym and running errands before work (thanks, Internet). I chose neutral everything to evade criticism, but what version of myself would ever leave out the color red or select Times as my font? After reviewing several other websites, I found one that did everything I was advised not to do---it refused to conform. After thinking this through long enough to actually make myself LATE for work, I realized that this person's persona matched the type of thing he does for a living. I’m talking about San Francisco columnist, Mark Morford, who writes edgy articles for SFGate. He’s offensive, vulgar at times, he attends Burning Man annually and in his spare time, teaches yoga in the Castro to stay centered. Is it fitting that his website font looks like it was pasted from a Sons of Anarchy Netflix preview? Yes. The answer is yes. And the answer to the question posed inwardly is that online representation is a personal one. Decide first who you are, then decide what you’re selling from your skeletal closet. Filters are fine, tact is fine---unless you’re Gordon Ramsay and are paid for being a jerk---but if those things are not unique to you, there’s a good chance you’ll fall into the milk-toast conformist category that nobody finds interesting. Be interesting, be yourself, but by all means, represent yourself, because bad publicity is better than no publicity at all, or so they say.

Summer Gardening 101

When Life Gives You Cucumbers

Make Lemonade

To Drink While Pickling Said Cucumbers

Because What's the Point of Growing Things

If Your Glass Isn't Always Half Full?

The strongest drug that exists for a person is another human being.

When you try not to love someone, though your irises are fixed glassily as distant mist forests, you still curl into the crushed coastal waves of their skin, as if their body's hollows magnetically draw you in and their every breath fits your broken breathing---then you know you love them like crazy, like you can't resist the chemistry that is him. 

Like, 

like, 

like you can't choose who you love, it just happens and despite all attempts to harden and contain, you soften in their bed: pliable, cuddly, sweet, infantile, sick. So sick that you need rehab to stop the fix. So sick that you must melt your own skin to stop it from soaking up that touch with such tingling euphoria.

A Post-Modernism Post

“Perhaps the crescendo of this gloom came only a decade and a half ago when anthropologist Marc Augé made his dismal conclusion about the nature of human interaction in physical space in his Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Augé suggests that our sense of place, as old as humanity, is coming to an end. Building on Marcel Mauss’s idea of place as a “culture localized in time and space,” Augé distinguishes places—locations in which individuals with distinct identities form human relationships that in turn accrete, creating the sediments of history—from non-places—spaces of transition absent of identity, human relationships, or the traces of history. Augé’s non-places are in-between spaces…” (Varnelis 18)

Varnelis’ use of the word gloom foreshadows humanity’s seemingly inevitable decline. Post-modern literature is thick with the robotic suburb battlefields and global decay found in Paolo Bacigalupi’s short story The People of Sand and Slag. Additionally, Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep projects the lost capacity for emotive response in humans common throughout post-modernity. Yet authors wage hypothetical wars in recognizable, semi-measurable spaces. These senses of “place, as old as humanity, [are] coming to an end.” The emergence of a new dimension, entirely hand-crafted is as invisible as imagination without key components such as viable power-sources, network connections and accessible databases. This intangibly populated model fits Varnelis' paradoxical frame described as “spaces of transition absent of identity, human relationships, or the traces of history.” Non-spaces exist with relevance because we (mortal gods) assign importance to them. The world wide web spread like a plague, statistically congruent with rising instances of obesity and ADHD. How does an army of 7.5 billion not-so-strong fight this invisible foe? Post-modernists predict mass extinction of humanity as we know it, and I predict the next world war will take place in a non-space inhabiting every home, market and government agency. The rise of the Internet marks the fall of geographic divides; countries formerly claiming terrain will fight to control a virtual realm instead. Gloomy is just one way to describe a robotic age—whether referring to technological animism or sub-human humans. However, if Varnelis’ non-spaces truly are in the state of in-between, the future’s pivot could shift any direction like a Deleuzian Rhizome. Humanity's survival is both determined and patterned after the collective force effectively connecting the past with the future.

No-Shave-November Should Be Forever

I love the rough hair on men's bristly faces

In class I daydream---imagining the flat-handed stretch of my palm

Pressed against the brittle-soft-whisker-grains of a stranger's cheek

I close my eyes to the perceived stinging intimacy 

There in the stubble: the breathing regions---textures of closeness

These men, animals really, with beards 

Covering their soft spaces

I'd place curiously-thirstily-exploring fingers upon their jowls

Masks of keratin cloaked with coarse winter growth

I find myself seeking that melting fusion where I'm singed 

In traces of masculine unshaven skin