HOW TO CAUSE A TORNADO

How do you cause a tornado? How do you create turbulent winds that cut through towns and make a witch of the old Gypsy? Is it when our laughter meets for the first time? Is it when our sweat and hot breath meet for the first time? Is it when we yell or we cry or we stand silent, noses inches apart? Is it when I leave the hospital and drive home with whisky on my breath?

Attachment

What happens to a memory when you discard the object that held it?

FOSSA OVALIS

Each of us is born with a cave in our heart. It's left over from the constructing you and your mother did to you. By the age of two, most people have sealed up their fossa ovalis, making their right heart whole. There are some, however, who spend their lives trying to find something to fit into that small, but important depression. And then there are those, even fewer yet, who realize the void to be a gift, and choose there to disappear completely when they find someone worth disappearing with.

Sad girl

Sad girl music doesn't help. I cannot make a poetry of dregs, no longer sharp, now flat and stale, a chore. I listen to women who sound like their mouths are full of blood from gnashing their teeth in rage and pretend I will smash my car into the back of a truck.

NAPKIN #613

Let your gaze drift out the window while waves crash upon the shore and freighting barges narrowly avoid collision, and imagine the moment on the bench in the bar when the bones of our hips hit and you made a smile through the moment of sharp pain.

Prayer beads

I'm alone again, my own again. A crabby, twisting organism, impetuous and impulse-prone again. I love things and live things by myself again. A bee without a drone again. I don't care about being someone's cool again. I'm my own bottomline again. I'm brown again. I'm blue again. I'm seeing green green green again. I like trees and cities more than people again. I'll be a wild strange body again, open up to new touch again. I'm recovering and discovering and covering myself in mud again. I'm bored with tepid love again. I'm deep again and raw again and healing like a wound again. I'm mad again and glad again. I'm listening to that old gal again. I'm defiant, on the move again. I love myself instead again.

TRAVELLING THE STATES

This is a travel song inaugurated with mad friends, and documented on a marijuana whim.

Sun, and moon, and hills, and, flats, and corn, and soy, and water, and murky water, and women with six names, and men in their mom's millionaire apartment complex overseeing the shore of Lake Michigan in downtown Chicago, and raced a stone turtle in the streets of suburban Baltimore at three in the morning until our laughter became loud enough that we ran three blocks over so we wouldn't get our friend who was putting us up in trouble, and road with waving false puddles, and trees, and shaved paths through the trees, and crowded dance halls where the Colombian girl tried to take you home and you were too drunk to say no but too drunk to act natural when you arrived so you came back at sunrise with a fat grin and no stories, and pissing on rooftops in Polish New York, and stealing a kiss from Hannah's friend when we all slept together in a big heap on the mattress we'd pulled out into the livingroom, and the thunderstorms making a Tesla coil of the midwest skies, and the solemn man who gave us a ride, and the excited man who gave us a ride, and the young woman and her younger sister who picked us up outside of Kansas City and drove us all the way to Denver, and the JUMP FOR JESUS Evangelical daredevil in the middle of the mosquito-ridden campsite in North Platte, and that umbrella that had a packet of cocaine(?) in it, and the withered old woman who punched you in the butt on the sidewalk and said something about cute kids walking around in the summer heat, and slowly spreading smolders in the grasses by the side of the freeway started when a Greyhound driver failed to notice he'd run over a mattress until it caught the bus on fire, and the Japanese lady who used my pencil and Moleskin to excitedly tell me about her time in California, and sunsets over the immediate Rockies as we slept in sleeping bags in a park in what constituted downtown Ogden after we failed to find anyone to put us up for the night, and when we played pool at four in the morning with some dready with a thick accent who called me White Jesus all night, and when we found out your dad was eating pills, and when Katie's mom was dying of cancer, and when drink put me in an angry stupor in Denver and I mumbled shit I couldn't even remember but had to apologize for, and when you got so mad about not being able to sleep on the train for 26hrs straight that you didn't talk to anyone the whole time we were in LA, and when shots of overpriced mezcal led to me sleeping with an old friend's old friend, and when we ate marijuana that the old man handed to us on the train and it didn't kick in until after your dad put me behind the wheel of a rental car, and when we found the empty chamber hall in the Chicago Cultural Center and filmed ourselves doing the shuffle, and when we ate Adderall and went for a long walk in Pittsburgh and you took pictures and then we went back to our friend's home and fucked so hard that I came over your head and into the closet and we just shut it and laughed, and when we laid ourselves down in the San Francisco sun in a park and a man came over and offered us beers because he was heading off and later a couple offered us leftovers from their wedding reception and we felt like the world could be magical, and when I saw my first firefly in New York, and the grandiosity of the Philadelphia train station, and the solemn silence of the Redwoods, and the unimaginable vastness of the Grand Canyon, and the long roads to nowhere, and the cushioned smash of the plane's tires on the tarmac, and the hiss of the bus' hydraulic lift, and unattended animals, and parking lots on roofs, and friends excited to see you return, and the same sun, and the same moon.