As I spent today wandering about the walkways, waterways, and byways I experienced the recurring notion that I was not expected to be anywhere, to be anyone other than where I was and who I was at that particular moment.

It's terribly soothing to know that what simply is is simply fine.

And that is all I could hope to have and to be: that which is simply fine.

Meanwhile, life goes on and on in its imploding circular funnel and I'm carried on the backs of so many tormenting waves. Waves of emotion, waves of demand, waves of breath and movement. And yet I've learned how to ride atop their crests instead of merely being dragged along in their merciless wakes.

Even in sleep I've somehow seemed to come into a position of comfortable coincidence.
We're passengers on the same vessel, sleep and I.
It's a ship of healing and rejuvenation.
And the tingle of fresh skin is just as tantalizing as the evasive comforts of a good night's slumber.

And now the question is when will these new foundlings be given freedom to roam and burn and scrape and renew?

I say here, I say now.
And then I sleep.

Pressed into the corners

Whenever I have to opportunity to discover a new experience there is a certain level of attachment to which I subconsciously hold. It's like my mind wants to relive it over and over again. And then my body follows suit.
I become fixated on the opportunity to take myself back to that moment, that sensation.
And I am helpless to resist.

It's such a wonderful set of chains.

And when you've wiped the foggy mirror clean

Made to be other.
I am a boy who loves men.
And they are my plight.

Howling kittens age.
Middle-aged daisies are plucked.
And youth is still gone.

Walk me to the ledge.
Take my hand, please. Or refrain.
Either way I'll breathe.

Perhaps you've known.
Or maybe that was mere chance.
Please keep my secret.

Once a mother-bird.
And next a prideful hunter.
Hatchlings left to wilt.

Pinkish wine-stained lips.
Horrible, empty eyeballs.
Still with your shoes on.

An early morning haiku

Paper dry foliage
Weightless and lifeless yet free
A soul of soft wind

Good morning, it's time to break your face.

And thus, upon waking at the brightest hour of 6am, I found myself unable to ignore the pathetic groans of a saturated bladder. I arrested myself from the comforts of my plush nest of a bed and made my way stumblingly to the bathroom.

I lifted the lid and seat, dropped trou, and let loose.
I then promptly fainted.

I came to and found myself embracing the toilet.
Now, I don't know how many times you've had the opportunity to feel your arms wrapped tenderly around a porcelain S-curve but it certainly does give one a new perspective on the priority of things.
Apparently, fainting makes a person really value the seriously unappreciated commode.
I made my way back to my feet and just as I was near to fully collecting myself I caught a glimpse of my face in the dingy mirror above my sink.

"Well hello there, gash-in-the-face," said my inward voice as I digested the image of my interrupted upper right cheek. A stream of dark cherry-colored blood ventured down my skin and mingled with my stubble. It was just a small thing. A trifle, really. But a laceration, to be sure. (I'm guessing my face came into passionate contact with the edge of the basin on my trip down to hug the porcelain goddess.)

In all honesty, I have to state that I addressed the whole would-be alarming situation with a relatively noteworthy ambivalence.
"Hmm," said that same little voice, "well this will certainly make for a sexy scar."

I roused the temporary roommate, Chad, with a brief recounting of what I could remember about the sink attacking me and tried to convince him that I was too tired to go to the emergency room. He combated my opinion with a fastidious opposition.
"We need to take you to the emergency room," he insisted, "if you sleep it's only going to scar."
(Uuuuhhhhmmm, this is bad why?- Granted, I'd just hit my head. Clearly things were a bit harried where my reasoning might have usually played a keener role.)

We shuffled into the car. But not before I made a pit stop at Stumptown to fetch some much needed caffeine and show off my recent faucet-induced injury.
The baristas were terribly accommodating and wished me the best as I headed off to Providence Medical Center (also know as Emergency Room Fun Camp).

Once there, I have to admit, everything got a little bit ridiculous.
I began the whole ordeal off by walking up to the admittance desk and announcing that I was the victim of spousal abuse.
With a due sense of alarm, the receptionist stopped whatever she was doing and rushed over to comfort me. I then informed her that I was, of course, kidding. And further, and there was to be any abuse in my relationship, I was clearly the one to be doing the roughing up. (I'm such a man.)
The receptionist laughed (I think in spite of herself) and then began walking me through the process of obtaining swift medical attention. Once we reached the question about whether or not I'd been into the emergency room before I responded by saying,
"Why, yes. Last summer, in fact. Why? Do I get to be part of a frequent flyer program? Do I get a punch card and after 10 visits the 11th is free?"
Her laugh just kind of burst out like it was hiding behind her gums and wasn't really supposed to be released. Like an insistent and untrained puppy.

The rest of the intake flew by and before I knew it I was having my blood pressure checked by a lovely nurse in Triage 1 (I was quite pleased to be place in Triage 1 because God knows how foul Triages 2 and 3 must have been). My blood pressure nurse said that I reminded her of her son in Las Vegas and I asked if her son happened to be named Cher.
Another untrained puppy laugh.

After I was declared perfectly healthy (and unstoppably entertaining) I was taken into the heart of the emergency room to bay 12 where I had a lovely view of the nervous center-like buzz that was the central console of the treatment center. Bay 12 consisted of a padded, white sheeted bed (with all of the imaginable bells and whistles), numerous tools and liquids and brightly colored containers, and a practitioner named Dr. Toy.

Dr. Toy was a jolly sort of 30-something with a smile that reminded me of one of Santa's elves and white doctor's coat that appeared to be a bit biggish. His assistant, Raquel, was additionally quirky with her pink scrunchie (1999? Yes, yes, it's NOAH! I love you, too! Such a lovely thing to hear from you!) and green sneakers that kind of reminded me a two toads strapped to each of her feet. I made ribbiting sounds when she left and Chad almost peed himself.

After discussing the situation leading up to my all-too-friendly encounter with the washroom, (could mean so many things), Dr. Toy declared that I most likely experienced something called Micturition Syncope. I was rapt. I hadn't just stupidly fainted. I had a condition. After informing me of my newfound favorite ailment, Dr. Toy departed with the promise of a swift return to deal with the aftermath of my trauma.

Meanwhile, I had Chad play paparazzi and photograph me with my sizable gauze pad.

Very shortly thereafter, Dr. Toy returned to anesthetize my cheek in preparation for the stitches I was going to need. He was pretty enthusiastic about his lidocane.
"This'll sting and then burn," he noted while getting dangerously close to my open eye with a knitting-needle-sized syringe full of cloudy liquid.
I think by "sting and then burn" Dr. Toy actually meant "I'm trying to kill you." All unpleasantness aside, he was definitely thorough. I think I got something like 5 injections in the space of about 1 square centimeter of cheek. One can never be too careful.

Once Dr. Toy finished harpooning my face he again left the room, informing me en route to the door that he wanted to allow the numbness ample time to develop around the area in question.

As soon as the room was completely vacated by hospital staff, Chad and I spent a few moments discussing how well I was taking the fact that I was the victim of a vicious bout of appliance abuse. We then pondered whether or not the resident nurses and intake assistants perhaps thought he's been beating on me and we creatively came up with the bathroom fainting story as a clever cover. I really hoped so.

Then, all of the sudden, a random doctor with a tie that looked like a piece of wilted paisley wallpaper and a name tag that proudly displayed the title "Frederick" came in, mumbling something about needing to get an extra catheter or some eye of newt or something. Without any reservation I immediately piped up:
"Ah, so you're Frederick," I said with a knowing tone, "we've heard a lot about you."
"Oh, really?" replied Frederick with an unmasked look of surprise, "I hope only good things."
"Oh, but of course," I replied with only the smoothest assurance (only slightly tempered with the most minute hint of obsequiousness), "mostly everyone's just made a point of noting your great taste in neckwear!"
Dr. Frederick looked happily flustered as he muttered an incoherent thank you noise and placed a hand on his limp accessory as he rushed from the room.

Again left in bay 12 with no one but Chad, I decided to break out the tunes and began playing thunderously contagious pop music, calling out the door that there was a dance party in number 12. One of the nurses seated at a desk in the center of the main area looked up, smirked, and bobbed her head a bit to the music. I simply gyrated from my perch atop the padded bed.

Dr. Toy soon returned and stitched up my cheek while the two of us talked about restaurants and working in the service industry. He was quite the man about town, it seemed what with all of the places he'd dined and owners he knew. I must say that I found it positively charming that he could discuss steak tartar while jabbing a scythe-like utility through human flesh and tying knots of black thread around smushy skin.

Once through, Dr. Toy thanked me for my positive attitude and told me the nurse with information about taking care of my wound would come in momentarily to send me home well-educated about my changing body.

Anna was the next victim of my eccentricity and she came bearing the release paperwork along with some sage advice about sun damage and the need to use vitamin E at night as opposed to during the day (oil, as it turns out, attracts sunlight which can exacerbate scarring and we simply couldn't have that). She then instructed me to apply some SPF 50 to the stitched area when in the sunshine in order to fend of those pesky rays.
I asked her if she was sponsored by Coppertone and she replied with, "Nope. Neutrogena, actually."

I liked Anna.

She then told me that the nurses in the main area had all been discussing "the hilarious guy in number 12" and decided that I was the most fun person they'd ever had in the ER. I stoically accepted the nomination and gave a dramatic Rodeo Queen wave to the scrubbies outside the room. My magnanimity never ceases to blossom.

Chad and I then returned to Belmont where I popped into Stumptown to show the baristas my lovely new needlework. Jessie, one of my current favorites, told me I looked really pretty and volunteered to hit me in the face on the other cheek to balance out the look.

I told her I was doing alright for the moment but if I ever decided I did need the service, she'd be the first person I'd call.
"Well, you know you kind of had this coming, right?" she prompted.
I inquired as to why and she quickly responded:
"If someone was constantly putting their dead skin and spit-up toothpaste down your throat don't you think you'd hit them, too?"

She had a point.

So, I guess the moral of this whole story is that one should never refrain from appreciating their bathroom fixtures. Take some time to love on your lavatory. Otherwise, it just might bite back.

Have you hugged kissed a Kohler today?
If not, you could end up like this...

The avocado lady at night

There was this middle aged woman named Kathryn who used to shop at the same market every Saturday
4:30 AM

She arrived each week promptly and 9am, bought a pastry and some coffee, and set out for her list of goods.
4:31 AM

Usually she only alotted about 45 minutes for the whole thing but sometimes she lapsed into the 50-60 minute range if the store happened to have some fresh stock of avocados.
4:31 AM

Kathryn loved avocados.
4:31 AM

But only when they were prefect.
4:31 AM

So she would spend positively ages looking for just the best ones.
4:31 AM

The most accurately shaped and supply ripe.
4:32 AM

And quite often she was met with sad disappointment and ended up settling for one or two of the meager options.
4:32 AM

One day, the store manager, Keith, came over to say hello to his Saturday regular.
4:32 AM

"Morning, Kat. How's the kitty doin'?"
4:33 AM

Keith had a thick Irish brogue and a general air of miscreance about him at all times and Kathryn had long since learned not to react to his vulgarity.
4:33 AM

She instead would say her neighborly reply greeting and then move on with her shopping.
4:34 AM

But this day there was a particularly promising bunch of avocados in the last bin on the produce wall and Kathryn was cornered there by Irish Keith right as she'd begun testing them all for bruises.
4:35 AM

"My Charlotte is doing just splendidly," replied Kathryn with a dried leaf thin crackle of automatic politeness.
4:35 AM

"Well, isn't that lovely? Always fancied a happy kitty to a sad one!"
4:36 AM

Irish Keith had little to no social graces (much less tact) whatsoever
4:36 AM

(it's a writing technique to show not tell)
4:37 AM

Well I'd find it awfully nice if I had the chance of meetin' 'er sometime soon," he added onto the end of his already far too unwieldy prior statement.
4:37 AM

"Perhaps I'll bring her in with me sometime," answered Charlotte with unmasked terseness. She was having trouble looking for her avocados.
4:38 AM

"Well, I'd certainly be happy to walk you home with your bags today," suggested Keith with a boyish glint in his bushy white brow crested eyes.
4:38 AM

"Maybe I could meet her then!"
4:39 AM

He sounded so childlike and hopeful.
4:39 AM

"Actually, I have a basket with me today." Said Kathryn through a curt smile.
And with that she walked herself up to the next available cashier.
Pending

She never got any avocados.
4:40 AM

And she never shopped at that store again.

Memory by the pound

It's happening just like I thought it would.
I guess I shouldn't have expected anything less. Like I deserve some sort of get out of jail free card or pass go collect no heartache whatsoever.
I've begun to miss him.

And in my missing him, I feel like an inward traitor because I was so happy for a moment that I lied to myself in saying it would always feel like that so that nothing would take away from my then present elation. I was living, really living!

But as with all things, really living only stays on a seasonal basis. And there is no moon to regulate them for they are ersatz and willfully so.
It's as if the wonderful and beautiful season that was the two of us is still so freshly acute in my sense memory that I have yet to see how the benefit of its joy could ever wear off.

Only now it has. It really has.

I've come to the autoanalytical conclusion that I have only two capacities in feeling my emotions: not at all or with complete surrender. When I am in a place of nonreactivity it's typically the result of some former deflation brought about most likely by some disappointment or unfulfilled expectations. Thus I've managed to coach myself into disallowing expectations to be formed, therefore eradicating the pesky and rotten feeling of a knotty and poisonous stomach.
However, when I'm in a place of complete saturation in feeling my emotional state holistically, I am flying. I soar above worry and trifles. I soar above criticism and doubt. I soar above convention and I touch the meaning of God in some ways, just being that far removed while so intertwined.

At the point when I knew it was no longer for our mutual best that we stay each other's, I was unaware of the coming wave of overwhelming happiness that would result from such life accomplishments as graduation and promotion. And quite honestly, their afterglow is toxic in something of a trailing and infiltrating manner. Only now is that beautiful and euphoric smoke completely dissipated. And so I come into the day with nothing on my back but the burden of knowledge I gladly carry throughout my charmed life.
Only now I must add to the weight the knowledge of how alone and ignored you may have felt.
How completely abandoned and utterly insular you must have loathed to possibly be.
I would not impress upon you these feelings as they are but my own, meager guesses. And yet I feel them somewhat educated by the lessons I've learned from you since we became two completely separate pieces.

I couldn't feel the pain because I wanted to feel nothing but the happiness.
I was in such deep longing need of true and uninhibited glee and rapture that I closed myself off from feeling the rue and agony of my recent thrusts of a killing knife at love.
It was a love borne of space.
And it is that same space that now feeds into such anger. Such hostility. Such sorrow.

"God, why couldn't I have only found contentment in the honest simplicities?"
And yet that same voice prompts me to hold fast to the seasons as they are the only fact of the matter. Change is the only definite.

And with the definites come limitations.
And thus is my newfound plight: what was promised to be the purest of freedom has now become the sincerest of shackles.

And only now am I able to take on the full trudge of their icy weight.
And you are like a fellow prisoner, bound to me by the same chains only you hang below me, suspended in the cold, wet darkness. And you pull on me. You pull me down.
And the less and less you struggle, the heavier you seem to become.
And as the weight is my love, it is also the angst I feel in the absence of you.

To truly be missed, and to truly miss, there is none who can escape the chains.

It hurts like razorcandy

When I try and swallow my whole throat signals me with a rasping and crumply pain that it is not in the best of states.
When I drink water in an attempt at soothing the squalor inside it's like trying to wet sand in the middle of the dessert: clumpy and fecund.
I suppose it's yet another physical manifestation of the fact that I simply cannot try to externalize everything about my own pain by seeking out the solutions to other people's problems.

The black tar rain

Hence gatekeepers, the black tar rain is nigh.
Barricades and plaster mouldings retrieve little of the safeties once known.
And as they might
None shall allowed be to lie in wait for yet another sunlit eventide.

Played as music from a hateful lyre
we open the gifts of ancestors filled with moths and rusted joints.
None shall enter these gates with singing and piety
for none shall be found.

And so we angrily cut open the sides of our cattle and sheep
with the love of patterns and matted furs.
Drinking red wine is to be enjoyed but not savoured.
Pretense. Is lying a sin?

Crested tree tops shine with the glimmer of moonpaints and stardeath.
And I am alone.
Where the lone shall reign
is only the best
of places.

For now.

It's nice is all

Never had a little strip of colored print made so many so happy.
That week's forecast was comprised of seven perfectly square bright blue boxes with egg yolk yellow spheres dobbing them all directly in the center. All lined up, the boxes could have been made into the beads of a cheery bracelet.