November 11, 1979
The dark mattress as listless and stunned. Bend over you back and legs up nice and how do you do. See how anyone can wait. The body softening like age and hardening like age still going. You were so soft and the mob crowd crowed a ritual death about your ideas. You chewed a new hole, right where the other one used to be.
January 6, 1980
This cookie can open the door.
There was grey and that grew greater with every day. There were snow-showers and thunderstorms, but a few feet away there was a dusk. Certain control and light horizontally being bright, bashed in hollow repetitions. There were new things here now and they had vaginas. Cries came spooling into the night. I looked through a window and saw my sister and she had legs and arms and came out of my mother’s stomach, waving.
My mother had staples there now, where the hole was.
August 20, 1980
Why was grandma not saying anything?
October 14, 1980
There are sides to certain issues, and this one has two. I spend my days playing with worms in puddles and figuring out if cutting one in half will really make two. The basketball hoop looks stupid to me, but I watch the older boys bounce that ball and I want to make it through that hoop too. The dragonfly council of fluttery dreams. I bruise my knee. The sun goes down and the grass smells cut and I eat a strawberry that doesn’t taste so good.
December 24, 1980
The tree felled long before. Cut and counted as another and sold as another thing to buy during the season. Bolts of woodsmoke and bathing before. What’s better than a present? Being present and sideways and nestled into the arms of those who give you things, the things you need and want and they seem so similar anyway. That damn dog is eating all the shrimp and you like shrimp the best. Two women talking loudly, and rapidly, to each other. There are things still to talk about.
April 4, 1981
We were in ardor. We spent the open ocean as burnt marshmallows and chocolate. And sand filled toes to tickle about. And poured out such games. The shakes of the body machine, working hard to be thrown out. Simple totter tale towards the sea-dawn drawn like a rowboat on a dock. Broadcast weather as over and over and done for now.
June 5, 1981
Just so many leaves on this tree and how I hate to resemble their flatness. Going forth and being together seems like the normal way to go. I touch the bark. I hide under the covers. I sustain myself so as to say I can be me, dancing, any time at all. And a certain picture, all night, I’ll have to give it up at some point.
March 3, 1982
Mom is older today. She is older than I am today.
Weren’t we happy here? Mom likes to look at the books enough and reads them later. Still, school far off, I know what a book is enough to flip through it and say “this is a good book!” to anyone who would listen.
I thought books that were longer were better because they were longer, were somehow more.
I don’t think so now.
September 24, 1982
The weather was perfectly fine.
I got what I wanted. Wanted at the time at least.
February 2, 1983
Dating that response as a final date whether or not I aliken once as systems tall frail the future date further in my breast sigh like the water in my bed. Can I watch you as you write this? The names of boys I purse through on my way to my bedroom. The feel of the feel of the heat against his face. There was rain. Napkins crumpled from the Chinese restaurant and the fortune cookies that say something nice. Why doesn’t taking pictures make for a clearer memory? I try to become an answer (beautiful) and that makes me seem less like a toddler. My whole body walks around the yard and I hate how much dogshit there is there. The heated gots hard scrubbed and it all shall be taken from you. Like the thems in this motion. I miss the butterflies trying so hard to displace their own beauty. The rains come down like so much confetti. t celebrate it, nor can cancel it’s happening. And his whole life he sits in this. I’d like to figure out the right numbers, the ones that matter, but it’s raining. It’s night. I will beg for more and dance like I’ve been begging all my life. These moments are beautiful because I dance them that way. I’m giving him the chosen me. My little apartment as expected to become.
I am the ugly boy who makes his mistakes look like a rolling down the hill, a happenstance that meanders swiped up the hilly schoolyard. I shit my pants in First Grade. I was told to go outside instead of watching the clown clowning because I didn’t like writing with my hand. I was sloppy and that made for a who cares. Father was an absence presence and spoke kindly about chocolate milk and Looney Tunes. We watched them together. And all of us watching the weather as if it were something that we could really figure out, something we could predict, our predictions feel so flat and fall short, even now.
July 6, 1983
White socks and how I wasted all that time on Jazzercise.
