Eyes in dispute

You're full of shit.
Ask your mom.

I say brown.

You claimed hazel.

You said small, I think they hold the horizon.

I looked into them and refused to see

the way you see

knowing me.

Arguable, finite 

A faceoul spacoul

Protecting Sara. J.

A moment with a phone. If you read thia, I'm really sorry!

Your smile always pushed too hard.

You don't remember this, but you always laughed...always smiled...cried each goog buy and hello, and filled the gaps between the laps full of perhaps, fantastically future scapes, unknown... 

This is just a moment alone with a phone, so, Like I told the room of gelded yuppies. So what-I don't give a flying fuck?

I got bigger problems then your pretend ones...

So, with all due respect... Did you really make a case for doubt, if not, you'll never figure out. 

Charge me for my feelings-they are real and date back to fields of borrowed grass.

I am honest. I'm really sorry. A moment with my phone perhaps.

Sometimes the truth is in a sensations,

it's an olfactory reaction,

It's bitter satisfaction.

Your choices/wants/actions/equivalent--it happens

You invoke a sense of self-critique that long ago fed my teeth.

Yeah? so? A momement with my phone!

Here's your empirical fear below!

The most beautiful voice I know and how I long for its echos.

Phantoms, spectators, old idioms I know.

I made a promise to a ghost.

I’ve held up my end, so who knows?

I set up qualifiers, you’ll never know.

The most beautiful eyes for sure,

but all I want to see is what they've seen.

Where is she now?

Hiding from the scene?

Everyday, I wonder how was hers?

The story goes: my kids got sick, then got well, they're so funny as I'm sure you know...

Yours?

What if; may I say? I don’t want to change a single part of yesterday.

But question the effect.

I met someone who seems nice, how was work, how's your life?

My kids were cute, this you'll adore.

what's that?

Not quite the grocery store?

Well that's nice that's life but you're no more. What the hell did I do to you? Invoke suspicious silly and ridiculous? Stepped on you to make it true? No, I only existed!

Your smile always pushed too hard. A gateway, a portal a linear bead, a singularity from now to childhood, you smile stuck for both of us.

Ironic isn't it?

Who's ducking assassins now?

yielding to the inexorable burden?

So worried, so pleasing so inadequate while so perfect. Due diligence and doubted. Bet your blamed for this. I'm sorry. But I exist!

Worried of perception?

Flipping the script a little bit?

It'd be funny, if I didn't care so much, if I didn't need to speak. If only to myself. 

Ever been used at you expense; For hope?

Watch as the unfulfilled petitioner lashes back at me, with exacting equality, because I can feign neutrality.

I don't know who has it worse.

You can inspire chaos in a snow-globe, heated flacks demonstrate: you can't reach my insides; but sure can shack.

Dawn was perfect this morning, golden-chilled, ice encrusted ground.

The air was still, you smelled of nothing.

I hate this town and every token hill.

A history like water and rain and no umbrella. I try not touch it. Fuck it. 

We're still friends you know?

Here am I again, I think I won considering everything.

Christ, a smile I'm not even sure was ever real...

I am. I exist!

I hope only, that in some small regard, you are benefited. Ego fed I guess, filled with confidence, I don't have anything else to give: respect admiration, a small amount of obsession then...

I didn’t act to bring me here, you didn’t act to cause the fear. Nothing needs to come. I don't know how to explain the cyphers, the pipers, the scape in how see the world. It's extra beautiful I swear, your a legend deep in there.

I don’t know?? I need to write this out and understand it more. One more moment with my phone.

I am trully selfish.

I know what I think but have never known the words. I think in shapes and smells, colors and voices, fear wants and poor past choices.

It’s totally chemical. You gave me oxytocin!!!

I must have imagined the Days inn lobby. 42, the preludes to heaven, the car the car the car and wow, strawberries, velvet, the taste of blood. Your smile always pushed too hard

May your pain be lies, said to taunt and tease me, it grieves me relentlessly like bright sparks against wet kindling. 

I like the shallow emptiness, wanting and getting, knowing and doing, having and owning-I know the two unique conditions, and good or bad, I am well within them.

You remind me, inspire me.

I’ll banner you up and push myself, but god woman, your proximity distracts!!!

If you ever came across this:

I am sorry and heinous, loathsome and sicken myself. For that I’m guiltless too, much is said by me of you.

What the hell did I do. Deep disparities, I existed? 

I guess I am still a self serving bastard after all... I just had a moment alone with my phone. At least I didn't...

Eyed-lined Discrepancies

5 now: The quality of your eyes is hereby disputed!

So you know... A minute passed...

The most over used emblem of happenstance.

Contemporary poetry, gag me please.

Time… Time, time, time, timie-time-time-time—puke

What did you expect; shades next, colors maybe?

What then; black, darkness, shadows again?

I don’t really agree with anything you said.

Your eyes are in dispute and they’re IN  your freaking head

You said some damn stupid color

Maybe a mixture with timed variances of them.

Mixtures. Something fancy, something normal, certain matches can be found in nature.

Bullshit! 

I can see the whole horizon in them

Nothing less than the full-world’s reflection

There not small just far away

Fuck your skewed facial space-relations

I’ll see whatever the hell I want

Beautiful no doubt

Timeless and in due course

Feelings and shit. That’s the implication aint it?

Your eyes are in dispute

You’re on notice!

I can’t claim to know what you use them for

But I know best what they are doing

Orbs, nothing more, the sight of heavenly orbs floating above an angel's voice. 

Sure, they hold mystery and offer interpretive freedom, a splintered religion, but they’re not so plain that they can be matched by any grain of wood

You said they were some damn stupid color or something

Your eyes are in dispute, they’re something else, they stand alone

Nothing comparable in nature can be found A crayola zenith as they’re like it all and in between, you know that space between atoms? There the unyielding attraction, universal glue. Reason, Fusion. Matter.

So when someone else asks: What color are your eyes?

maybe you should think to say: They are like nothing else you'll ever see for the rest of you life... 

35 MM film, I'm Sorry.

Hidden from sunlight.

Desperate like Nosferatu,

You coil in darkness,

Locking thirty, some odd, thousand words—unheard

Sun to you was everything and left empty

Rendering another, like endless suffering—for nothing

Burning offerings, recalling destruction.

A minute with you, my blessings my vision remaining.

I started with you and something was missing.

Instant gratification.

Rock-paper-scissors, Progress wins...

And, convenience always beat you then. 

I got addicted to the hustle,

The hour push through—digital gateway move.

I brought you, concealed you, to later reveal the insufficiency of my memory,

Waiting for my picture-imperfect imagery.

Like caste about seeds, my muse had breathed into thee,

One from each dozen I'd show her to.

If both met perfect conditions, the first clarity, the later, uncertainty.

The later had books and books of brilliance,

Mine are books lost to arrogance.

35 mm film—I'm sorry

I couldn't protect you from external misery and other elements.

Thanks for the music and the airplanes.

What are you but a swell, a tide, a moment that comes and goes with the moon light?

Why are you but my smile, a chance to be, a reason for the stars in the sky.

There is a god in heaven, this I believe, but I held you in my arms until that moment left me.

There is air to breath, it sustains me, a breath's bread and water missing your sent.

What is life but a moment, a second, ever reducing, 

subtracting, fracturing

dividing the instant that now is, from no hope of redemption

a subtraction from the day that I selflessly left you.

Why is now--this instant, when never is so far with you always in it.

Well, thank god for memory.

History

Journal 1 Humanity.

5-2015

Sudden Nowhere

Early in July and late in the day is about the time I first realized I was alone in literally the middle of nowhere. Everyone was gone and camp was left in shambles. It was about five in the afternoon and I had just climbed up Frog Hill to get out of the river-cut canyon. But I am getting ahead of myself; let me first go back in time about an hour to help draw a better picture.

 Frog Hill was nothing special. I don’t even think it had a legitimate name. I just called it Frog Hill because I watched a frog accidently kill itself there. I scared the poor thing so it was kind of my fault. Naming it that was the least I could do. It saw me and hopped a little too far out, and the angle of Frog Hill was so great that its little black and red body just could not do anything but stick the landing. Splat! Other than that, Frog Hill was just one of a million banks at the base of one of the thousands of mountains in one of the biggest wilderness areas on this side of the Canadian border. Climbing it meant I’d reach camp faster than going downriver to the Flats by the bridge, and that was my goal.

The Flats was the easy way to get from the New River to the Jim Jam. Jim Jam is the actual name of the road I write of. Jim Jam is found on both the official BLM and NFS topographical maps. Going to the Flats still meant a couple acres more of climbing over wet, mossy boulders and swimming downstream; but It was already almost four and the sun, previously cut to fragments by the dense tree-line, was about to dive beyond Devils Backbone. Devils Backbone is the legitimate name of southern mountain that was nearest to us. It’s the same mountain that inspired the horror movie, Devils Backbone, which has nothing to do why I was in a hurry to get back.

Frog Hill was a climb that had to be made with picks in each hand. Climbing the erosion carved bedrock was easy, but then the bank became steep and loosely packed sand-dustier now that the various species of ferns and California-soaproot-Chlorogalum pomeridianum, had all dried up. All that was left was dead grass and rezones Toxicodendrom diversilobum, more widely known as Poison oak. The grass would pull lose if you grabbed at it and while the Poison oak was steadfastly rooted, I was reluctant to grab it-I’m not saying I hadn’t used it to keep from falling in the past-it’s just that the T. diversilobum had its own drawbacks. I rarely went this way to and from my gold-mine because the risk wasn’t worth the time saved. But that day I was going to do it. I was feeling strong and I was excited to get back to Safe-camp-the camp that didn’t risk flash-flooding or the occasional landslide. It was labor intensive and my feet slipped out from under me a couple of times but finally I summated on the upper trail, Jim Jam, about a hundred feet or so from Safe-camp.

I finished the rest of the walk. A relatively easy march up Jim Jam to where my truck was parked with our solar-powered six-pac-camper sitting in the back of it. When I got to camp my family was gone and our car was gone. I didn’t know where they were. The site was wrecked and my three perfect boys were gone. I looked for a note from my wife but couldn’t find one. “What was your hurry sexy face?” I casually queried of the nothing, beneath my breath as my eyes danced about the wrecked campsite trying to make sense of what I was looking at. “Where’s the note, baby?”

Still dripping wet in mud-caked knees, I started off towards Ben’s house. I thought my family might have been there. “They should be coming up the road anytime.” I kept telling myself. “My wife can handle them, they’re fine.” I’d reassure myself then shake off the image of Eros’s lifeless body floating down the river. “Why is the camp wrecked? Did our resident black bear finally tear it up while everyone was gone?” We had settled on always getting back to Safe-camp before dark. It was something we never moved on, and always agreed upon. “What was wrong?”

I knew I received this compulsive worry from my mother. It was inside me by both blood and home-nature and nurture. As a child, some days for no reason at all, she’d run down to the creek, where my brother and I would play, and was almost frantic with fear. Birthed in her mind was the thought that one of us was hurt or drowned or something worse. Fears like this just seemed to germinate in her mind out of the cosmic ether.  I knew I couldn’t let my mind wander-not then. There was real and dynamic danger afoot. It was getting dark. We’d been reading about Odysseus around the camp fire lately and I knew by that point there would be no moon tonight; or as those from the time of Odysseus would say: Phoebe would not grace these hills with her glowing face until moments before Apollo dragged us up the sun. It was that part of her cycle. However, as someone from my time and local would say: the nighttime was when we had to share the only road with the area’s large black bear population. I had to focus, sing loudly, and not step of the side of the road and subsequent cliff that gained in altitude as one traveled further south down Jim Jam.

“She’s ok, they’re all ok. She could have locked the keys in the car or something.” I fed those words to the sound of each water filled boot-fall as I moved forward into the cascading darkness. Slish-sloshing into the approaching canopy-expedited near sightlessness, I continued my inner battle of faith and worry. “She should be driving up any second.” These reassuring thoughts repeated for about five miles past the Flats, like a coin spinning to its rest on a bookless coffee table until the chance of her driving back laid flatly face-down. I forgot about the bears, I didn’t worry about night, and I forgot to reassure myself everything was alright. I started remembering how just days earlier, in the corner of my eye, Eros, my first born, perfect, and angelic little boy, came flailing down the river, submerged in both real danger and fear. He had only just fallen in less than a half second before I fished him out; but I could not shake the many could-be’s out of my head that this one event fueled. “Why didn’t my wife see him? I mean she was sitting right there staring right past him into space.” She promised me after that that she would only take them to the Flats just past the bridge, wherein altitude, the road kissed the river. “She’d have been fine there. The kids wouldn’t even hazard sunburn there.”

The Flats was a sandy shaded beach that skirted a place in the river that was slow moving and shallow-no deeper than six or seven inches. I steadied my breath the best that I could. I knew my boys, the twins, now 14 months old and nothing but giggles, wouldn’t even go near the tepid water; and Lisa, my musically brilliant wife, kept her bear mace on her person at all times, even though the bears ran from us at every sighting so far.  

The war of speculation waged on until amongst my inner thoughts one subject prevailed: “Why was the camp crashed to pieces? Why hadn’t Lisa, my wonderful wife, left me a note?” I started to run the rest way to Ben’s house.

Around ten that night I got to Ben’s house, the nearest house with a land line, and I could see a red ember floating where I knew his front porch to be. Even though the creamy yellow light escaping his kitchen window was faint, its relative brilliance stole away the remaining bleak starlit outline of the road left to travel. I stopped running and scuffed my feet against the ground to tactilely sense for the grass that made up the easement edging my path. If I stepped over the lawn-drawn boarder before the garden-bridge, I may step into the deep-walled irrigation canal that powered Ben’s home and watered his crops and was then, nothing more than a soft tricking song mantled within this darkened worry-rich obscurity.

“Hey.” I said hoping it was Ben and not his belligerent husband, Josh. Josh was a flipping saddle hole, and unless he changed from then to now, still is. At any rate, I didn’t want to talk to him right then. I felt justifiably primal and wild and Josh’s homosexuality had been the only thing saving him from me in the past. I knew if he slapped me or even came before me in movements after merely the utterance of a threat of violence, the looming baited trap of affirmative action would only goad me further into closing his insufferable whisky scented mouth once and for all.

“Hi.”  I said to the red dot and smell of smoke.

“Hey.” An audible sigh of relief escaped my mouth when I heard Ben’s welcoming voice just before the porch light flipped on. “You walked from the bridge?” He was surprised.

“Yeah. Can I…”

“Use my phone?” He interrupted. “Sure, yes. Come in, come in.” he urged me caringly along.

“Thanks Ben.” Carefully, I shrugged out from under his hand before it manually guided me into his house. His house reeked of raw rotted chicken and mildew and I instinctively associated the smell with his touch, but only worried for a second that I might have offended him before I became more concerned with my own problems again. “I’m so dirty Ben.” I briefly explained away my involuntary body language as I took his phone outside to first, make the call and secondly, breathe.

I didn’t really expect an answer when I called our cell phone. Ben’s house was still about an hour and a half by car, away from the nearest cell coverage. “Are the kids ok, what’s wrong, are you ok?” I asked in a fuming hustle; still catching my breath, still partly delusional from my inherited, mitochondrial-worry.

I learnt that: “they are all fine, she’s sorry, and she’s on her way back but can’t talk in traffic. In the moment, all I hold on to is, that they were fine-my boys are ok.” I explained this all to Ben and he offered me a ride.

Ben drove me most of the way back to Safe-camp, he never drove across the bridge and Humboldt County line. It had something to do with space-satellites and a black computerized bracelet he was court-ordered to wear on his ankle. I got out at the Flats and when my eyes adjusted to the dark after his high-beams finally evaporated with the increased distance between his car and me, I finished the short moonless walk to camp.

I lit the oil lamps and started to clean up. We had taken great precautions not to entice the bears, to keep a clean camp, and not piss anyone one off more than or presence already did. However, that night, food was scattered everywhere. I picked up papers and county records, geological data forms, the NFS mining outpost-operations permits that had been posted-as required-in conspicuous places, and the BLM maps that outlined our mine’s borders. I cleaned up the meat-type foods and gathered-up the most important papers in a perfunctory manner, and then struggled to go to bed.

“We were going to talk about leaving to night. Was she mad? She must be mad. This wasn’t an accident? She probably trashed the camp on purpose.” I kept remembering the way she looked right past Eros as he almost drowned. I remembered something else weird she recently said, something just out of the blue about another year of her life being put on hold. I didn’t know what she was talking about. “We were going to head back to civilization in only six weeks. What did she mean by “another year wasted?” Coming here was her idea. I had been wrong about the moon too, for Phoebe was in almost full splendor above me by the time I finished cleaning camp and climbed into the camper. I remember my thoughts and glimpses of our talks. I was trying to force the wrong random puzzle pieces to fit into a board of logic. I was still cutting edges off of the facts as the growling river finally lolled me to sleep. I was worried but I mostly rejoiced that none of the boys had been hurt.  

The next morning came slowly. Phoebe hung around until almost noon. I cleaned a little more of camp and my family never came back; but, I wasn’t surprised by then. I had noticed by that afternoon she had also taken my driver’s license and bank cards and I was sure by then she was who wrecked the camp-not a wild bear. I had been lucky that I, by nothing more than habit, grabbed my truck keys that last morning, or she’d have taken them too.

She has her reasons and I may never see them like she does. We have three kids and that was enough for her and her potential music career and she needed time and help to do what she felt was right for her own life. I say out loud from time to time that I understand why she did it; but inside I don’t-I don’t think I ever will understand.

I know what obvious implication arise by the nature of our situation and her actions. I know that by denying these preemptively I’d only further these implications. However, I will record this: Her music career is as important to her as my kids are to me. We thought them living free from cultural pressure and television was important for the longevity of their happiness. I supported her in her music wholeheartedly. Every house we moved from, every big decision we made was at her behest. It’s just in the last one, the decision that by law-by the Constitution as defined by the Supreme Court-was hers alone to make. But for that one, she believed I would try my hardest to talk her out of it. I confess in this one matter, she’d be right, I would have fought her. So she sagely decided not to tell me and to leave me stranded in deep wilderness to do what she thought would best aid her in accomplishing her dreams.

I look back from today with perfect vision. I know now how she was able to blankly watch my oldest boy franticly struggle down the river without noticing him. I know what the periods of silence meant and I understand what she was thinking so hard about or what was meant by the words “wasting another year of her life.” I maintain that wasting life is the problem.

But then, I was alone and that condition was sudden. I had no idea what was happening. I was immersed in an ignorance to which my sanity still thanks. At the time I knew I had three kids who needed me with them. I knew, inside and out, my wife. I knew her now and I knew her then, and though knowing these things about her, I accepted her past without judgment; but I knew what that meant for my boys and where she was taking them. I needed to be closer to my kids. I gathered up my oversized clothing and everything carbon based and piled it high in the opening where we told our ghost stories, read Homer, and had our nightly campfires. I put everything unnecessary into that pile and somehow it was doused with lamp oil and caught fire.

Brilliant flame bathed me in blistering heat as I sat there and formulated my new plan. I had deep seeded values that I had carried with me my entire life. That night I needed to toss them aside and be reborn from the fire. I had to somehow get past problems like no fuel in my truck, no money, and no way to sale my gold without my identification cards that my wife so wisely deprived me of those days before.

There are the intentions of each person, and as real, are the problems that hang between each person and the actuation of each intention. Between me and my intentions were sixteen hundred miles to cover-a hundred of which was just to get to the first fuel station, and I had no fuel. There was the sickness that came to me that first night after walking to Ben’s house; shrouded in freezing worry had caused my lungs to then be full of fluid and to cast a bleeding cough. There were my values and my wanting-the two could not mix, and I knew that one, for the moment, had to go.   

I sat there before the blazing culmination of the prior four months of hard work and all our sweat and my blood and her soul. I honored my lost friends, I prized my children above all, and I made my values know to my intent and vise versa. I prayed for a touch of the phoenix. I prayed for the ashes tool cool with haste. I stood there totally free for the last time and ignored the fire shimmering through the falling droplets of maybe my last outlet of necked honesty. And when the heat was gone, in the slowly retreating darkness of early morning I found in the ashes what I needed to do.

    I am only one part of an equation in all this. Not even the most important factor to even myself. The math was sound, but I answered wrong by changing my quantitative value. I answered wrong, against my nature by even coming back to Utah to the city where I was born. I answered wrong against my nature by seeking out help, and in this act, my life was spared with medical intervention. I answered wrong by asking for credentialed advice. Thus, recently I was instructed to describe myself in a world where everything was perceived by me as perfect. The question was approximately this: “From an arbitrary date in the future and from then on out-how would you respond, how would you appear, if everything was better/perfect?” I say that now and the future is written in stone regardless of our perception of it. Perceiving perfection in chaos is crazy. So I think I’m going to read more about Scientology and enjoy my feelings and imperfect perception. Because as it’s said: “Perfection cannot be sustained, be it by the participant or the condition or both. This is axiomatic; perfection begot complacency-complacency was imperfect.” (Smith 2012)

screaming at night.

Push the questions aside, 

I didn't ask for this 
I was only asked to abide.
I Keep the heartache inside, 
I didn't say I wanted this 
I didn't long for this,

The idea wasn't mine.

Freedom-what a concept.
Does someone know better than I?
Or am I Just soul for the fodder,
a seed's hope in water.

Amongst the cover crops is the cover ups,

The settling,
the beauty of questions.
Who'll ask of your perceptions
So maybe I asked myself: what about the sunset, the throw of moonlight through the blinds, the pale silky lines craw down a wall my voice never booms from.
who can see the sky in panoramic heartache vision,
smell a rose just walking by.
You might ask yourself too: "does he still know the sunsets are mine-does he still take these trivial hallmarks of nature's design and assign them their meaningful passages/
Memorialized?"
Years of slow deactivation of time,
lineal distance losing its charge
Stardust...
as the cogs of a heart wear rusty,
like the spring of a clock losing its wind.
Ten minutes till the minute hand slows on 12 
the little one as well,
I ask myself about myself:
"do you think of me at midnight-after a bad dream, after a kids screams or a man for that  matter-any-damn-thing."
Can you do it too-what I do?
Or can you not cope, rather compensate with resolving the moment, changing you mind into wanting the current
the handful last grabbed,
forgetting the wonder of wanting what’s left,
whatever is-broken don't fix it
nor is it to blame,
reinforce it and coerce it, but we're no longer the same.
Can you lie to the mirror… I scream!
 are you fucking crazy or ruthless!
brainwashed or clueless!
who am I talking about, because I didn't ask for this I was only asked to abide. Keep those words in mind,
I willingly Keep the heartache inside, I never wanted this
I didn't long for this,
this wasn't my idea!

Now that I'm here, I'm should face my own lies.
My esteemed view of you-I'll never stop it!
I've spent so many years, where I've already tried.
But nowhere-here I am,
I didn't ask for it,
I just stopped refusing to abide.