CPL · 593H

cyanotype on white cotton fabric, wood and colored felt.
dimensions: 12" x 27"

someone left twigs in the street tonight
hansel & gretel bird bones
completely hollow
throw some more bows on the pining
so many crushed under my shoes
turning to sand as they sing,
"given the chance
i'd die like a baby
on some faraway beach"
with someone's last summer arm around me

went with a&c to help mom in her classroom this morning. i have decided that i would like to officially announce that i love kid art. it is interesting to think about it in terms of the art classes i am currently taking at fresno state. it becomes like high art or something. i'd like to know what kant thought about kid art. i bet he'd find a lot of it to be really beautiful! free from concepts (in the modern art sense) and just about form. kids are the best abstract expressionists because they have no baggage! i saw their takes on such heavy concepts as the planets in our solar system, the underground railroad and pablo picasso! (also some really cute shit about monkeys and crocodiles!) i wish i could be an art critic for little children because most of them are so good but how hard would it be to tell a child seriously that they had no talent?? (cuz some of them don't.) oh damn i just went there. but no lots of kids are really talented. i would estimate from today about 25%. we shouldn't be allowed to teach art. it would probably be a lot better if we didn't. i'm probably in the wrong field! :(


anyway later a&i went on a bike ride to woodward park. it was so windy. and when we got to woodward it was persian day and we wanted so badly to shark up on the picnic and eat the food but we didn't have an inside except for a's very limited understanding of farsi so we had no choice but to look on in tragic sadness as the music was bumpin and the people were dancin. and then after we got home our thighs were totally sore.


THE END.

i just awoke wide from a dream i only remember the last half of. i was out walking with my mom and we saw a helicopter land on the roof of our house, only it was a different much larger house and my dad was in it. my dad told me the old guy in the helicopter was part of some government experiment but the guy wasn't aware of what it was. dad showed me pictures of a secret meeting in hawaii and told me the old guy had a bottle of red stripe jamaican lager up his ass. i was told to act casual. i went down the ladder with a guitar i couldn't play and made polite chit chat with the old guy and his wife while they were issued a questionnaire. later on my dad turned off the power in one of the upstairs rooms because my uncle was haunting it. i wanted to watch tv in the room but because of the power cut i couldn't switch anything on. then after a while the switches started working, but instead of turning on their intended appliance, they'd switch on something else in the room. i finally brought the tv to life by switching on a lamp.


anyhow, to restate the subject of this post: something somewhere doesn't feel right. it feels sort of like the time i woke up and thought the house was on fire but it turned out i had food poisoning and i barfed instead. totally random. i feel sad too. flat and sad. i'm going to drink a few more beers and try to fall back to sleep. it's too early to be so on.

hogs on hogs & wives of hogs
it's a straight shot to the mountain, men
a straight shot to the semen
blazing trails and blazing green
leaving women and seeds to grow and whither and die like we
history to point
coastal california here we come

turd. highly evolved cockroach
turd. highly evolved cockroach
turd. highly evolved cockroach
turd. highly evolved cockroach
turd. highly evolved cockroach
a. flower. in his. lapel.
a. flower. in his. lapel.
flower. in his. lapel.
turd. highly evolved cockroach
turd. highly evolved cockroach
turd. highly evolved cockroach
turd. highly evolved cockroach
turd. highly evolved cockroach
hi cock! a flower in my
highly evolved lapel
got a lot a shit to sell
you look like you could do well
with some of my highly evolved shit
and that's a compliment, turd!

wealth in copperz robber pauperz
sherwood forest here we come!
get yer horses violent forces
washed out violet uv rayz
it's the end of dayz, the end of dayz!
chicken little dew is spittle
from all the heads forced to tha ground
gather thee comiteeeeee
figure out thee party eeee ee
ultra violent streamerz
infraredscare streamerz of hot hot blood
n e body hungry eeee ee?
i'll make a plate o sarniez eez eez
if 'ey don't make us sleepy eeee ee
everybody jumps bail and liftz the iron curtainz up
like so many petticoatz!
father/ daughter dance ice cream socialsuchandsuch
fuck you and yer churchgoincakewalkzinz
women quilt in circles but
tha MEN'll raise tha barnz uninvited down mexico way

& jupiter in saturn
in vicodin sunshine
both have two beers drunk
down ninety-nine to
the town of Our Lady,
Queen of the City of Angels
for rhetorical hot cocoa
for metaphorical sin &
baptism by pyre
for on the pacific and
north american plates
the wedding feast is set

august 1994, the night before my family moved from pennsylvania to california, and i'm in my bed in my room among boxes of my things: a sleepless night and i'm crying about christmas trees. in the middle of summer mind you. i'm just a few weeks shy of eleven years old. as i mentioned i'm crying. what a dramatist i am. it works. mom comes into my room to see what's up. asks me why i'm crying. i'm crying because in california they don't have christmas trees, they've got palm trees. and they put christmas lights on palm trees in lieu of christmas trees. and there's no snow. it's like, summer, always. narnia in reverse. it's like what's the point, you know? christmas by definition is snow and all that comes with it, and lights lighting up christmas trees. mom assures me that there are christmas trees in california, though i can tell that for a moment anyway she is wondering to herself if there really are christmas trees in california. for sure it's never crossed her mind before. i can see this on her face. this is something i actually cried about... and i'd forgotten all about it until the other night, late, when i was walking my dogs and i found myself staring drunkenly, stupidly, at an enormous palm tree dressed in red white & blue christmas tree lights. just staring at it, you know?



i had a dream last night that i had gone on some errand in the night and i'd gotten stranded without a ride home. i didn't know where i was exactly and i wasn't sure how long it would take, but i knew the general direction and i opted to walk home hoping i could make it before dawn at least. there were lots of people milling around in the city streets. it was the solstice night and the homeless people were having a festival. they were playing guitar and singing around their trash fires. i walked on and on. i came to a multistory roller rink which seemed to have been converted from an old parking garage. though it was past midnight things in the roller rink were going full tilt. there were wide wooden slides between the levels which seemed hazardous to me but the people were having a blast sliding down them on their skates. obviously, on the roller skates, it was nearly impossible to return to the level from whence you'd come, so i found myself sorta stuck between my fear of going down a level and being unable to transcend to the level above.



misha and i had a chat earlier about the symbolism of this dream. it's so strange how the unconscious mind has the capacity to narrate a fable of sorts that most people never interpret with their conscious mind. it's like a whisper in the ear when you're sleeping. how much do we learn from our dreams? most dreams can't be analyzed by the conscious mind because most dreams can't even be totally recalled. but isn't it strange and also amazing that our unconscious minds go on lecturing us when we're at our most unconscious? and what are we learning from them? it is incoherent, disconnected, at times psychotic... but why does it seem that that whispering voice is sometimes infinitely wiser, more 'together,' than we are - wide awake and feeling like we're paying attention?

had way too many dreams. lots about not knowing whether anyone is dead or alive, or dead but just going through the motions of being alive. poetic, i know. i had this one dream where alexis and chelsea and i were in some parking lot and this group of guys in suits swooped in on us and tried to capture us. and i think it was maybe alexis who said, "you know the drill! Scatter Formation then regroup in The Place!" now, i actually didn't know where The Place was, but given that we had no time to discuss it further i proceeded to Scatter Formation. out of the parking lot and over a ridge to a hotel on a dune by the sea. and then scaling down the rocky cliff to the shore where there were lots of people surfing and sunbathing. i thought i might be able to hide out in the bowels of the hotel for a while where i called alexis to ask about The Place. The Place, alexis told me, was big sur and chelsea was apparently already there. i wondered how chelsea had gotten there so quickly having abandoned her car in the parking lot. i wondered then how i was going to get to big sur without a car.



in another dream my dad and i were spies in india. we were there to smuggle information out of the country. we started out at a bazaar where vendors were selling all kinds of fresh fruit. i recognized the dragon fruit from my trip to taiwan, (only it looked different in the dream,) and i wanted to buy some. at one of the stands an indian woman was explaining to some annoying touristy western woman what kinds of produce she had for sale, giving the woman the indian names. "but what IS it?" the woman kept asking. "it looks "DISGUSTing. irritated, i explained to the woman that it was all just fruits and vegetables and that she surely ate far more disgusting things on a daily basis. as this western woman was becoming huffy and indignant, several helicopters flew over the bazaar and my dad told me that the army must've caught wind of our presence. we went back to the hotel to prepare for our mission. there was a winding stairway to go up and up. the stairwell was lined with old family photographs. i thought about hiding the sheets of data we were about to acquire behind one of the photographs and i checked from time to time to see which ones had sufficient space behind the frame. at the top of the stairway there was a door, and on the landing beyond was a baby.



this is the third dream i've had in the past month to feature a baby.

remember the "roof kittens" from my previous post about cat town u.s.a.? the ones born on my neighbor's roof? well they've been down from the roof for about 3 weeks now and the three of them and their mother have all been spayed. we're still putting food out for them every night so in a way they're still under our care, though they're basically wild animals and they hiss at us before every mealtime.


well the one my mom calls 'topaz' got herself stuck up in a very tall tree in our back yard sometime during the day on the 13th. so all that night she was perched up there crying. in the morning my mom put food at the base of the tree hoping to lure her down. there were already several big black crows circling around her. when she still hadn't come down by nightfall my mom was starting to get very anxious. there didn't seem to be anyone in the phone book who would come and rescue her. i told her that topaz would come down when she got hungry and thirsty enough.


yesterday morning i came home to find a note on my door, asking me to go out and call up to her and make sure she was alright. so i went outside and called up but i didn't get any response. i assumed she had gotten down so i went inside. but she must have been asleep because again at nightfall she started meowing her little head off.


it had been two full days she'd been up there and i was determined to get her down. i went outside with the flashlight and a bowl of food and called up. she came down the tree most of the way to meet me, but she remained very much out of reach. i climbed up on the fence and held the bowl as high as i could and she came down just enough to voraciously stick her head in the bowl, raining chow down upon me. i let her eat for a while and then i called to my mom through the open window to bring me a laundry basket. so out she came with a laundry basket and a can of wet food. i held both of these up to topaz hoping she would jump in to get the wet food, but she was too afraid to let go and we had to abandon that plan after 10 minutes or so. then i asked my mom if she'd hold the basket as high as she could and maybe i could climb up the tree a little ways from the fence and drop her in. so this is how we finally got her down. my mom held the basket about level with the fence and i climbed up very carefully picking the thickest branches (not very thick) until i was high enough to grab her by the scruff of her neck. she didn't want to let go of the branch despite my shouting "let go! let go!" but i was able to pry her away and drop her in the basket without so much as a scratch.


the odd thing was she was very affectionate. she was rubbing up against mom and i and letting us pet her, which was certainly a first. we took her out front and reunited her with her sisters. she ate and drank quite a bit, poor thing. when i go out to feed them tonight she'll probably be back to hissing at me.


so why make a relatively simple story so long? because i have an essay to write of course! i don't even know what i'm going to do it on yet and it's due early saturday morning. better get cracking! just after i walk the dogs... and maybe after i get something to eat. before work though. or maybe i'll just do a repeat of 2 weeks ago and do the whole thing tomorrow.


i had a strange dream about state college. i was walking through lots of alleyways and noticing that the new trend of that town was to have your dog or cat published in the newspaper and then blow up the clipping to a ridiculous size and put it in a window box on the front of your house.


oh and i forgot to mention, last friday, a small airplane hit a truck in my delivery area as it was coming in for a landing at the sierra sky park airport. it happened right on herndon, which is one of the busiest streets in my zone. they closed herndon off for a while, between brawley and blythe, causing me to have to take many creative detours. but as traffic slowed for the night the road was reopened and i drove through to see the wreckage. it looked like the driver of the truck was probably ok because it was just the top of the truck that was damaged, but the plane looked pretty roughed up.

it's bad enough to feel like a second class citizen any time of year, but this time of this year is especially bad as the time draws near for californians to vote yes or no on proposition 8. if prop 8 passes it will once again strip away the right of non-heterosexual men and women to marry, deemed unconstitutional countless times, most recently earlier this year by a state court in san francisco. idiotically, this proposition seems to be the most fiercely debated this year, despite everything else about america turning to shit before our eyes. the economy is collapsing, we're entering into a new depression the likes of which we haven't known since the great stock market crash of 1929, and yet the right of two men or two women to marry has become the biggest issue of the times. i receive mail about voting yes on prop 8. "restore traditional marriage. protect our children. overturn activist judges," it says. the graphic is the outline of a man and a woman and two very small children holding up a banner reading "yes on 8, protect marriage." firstly, there is nothing about prop 8 that is in any way restrictive to so-called "traditional marriage." secondly, what the fuck do children have to do with anything? and lastly, since when has activism for equal rights been a negative thing? the inside of the pamphlet goes on to say, "vote YES ON 8 to restore traditional marriage and overturn the outrageous decision of four activist judges from san francisco. the people's will matters." in reality the people's will does not matter in a society where everyone is supposedly equal and it has been determined to be unconstitutional to deny non-heterosexual couples the right to marry. domestic partnership and marriage are not the same thing! they do not provide the same rights. it is glaringly obvious that non-heterosexuals and heterosexuals are not treated equally in this country. and it is disheartening and hurtful to see "yes on 8" signs springing up in my own neighborhood, where night and day i must pass them while walking my dogs. it is ridiculous to so vehemently deny anyone the right to equality while in every other sense our country is going to hell in a hand basket. instead why not realize everything that america set out to be from the beginning? why not grant everyone the same rights so we can tackle the real issues about our desperately failing economy with some sense of togetherness?


the worst part is that i know proposition 8 will pass, and while i am not at all personally concerned with my right to marry, (as i am not religious,) i can't help but feel that i am serving injustice by remaining a tax paying citizen of a country that denies citizens of their rights. one way or another i will leave the u.s. once i've earned my degree. i really can't stand it here any more.

oh my! a bamboo cage full of scantily clad people. people that tried to escape the treacherous maze beyond and were captured by the ever vigilant uniformed guards. i only made it as far as the public art section of the maze, all concrete and brightly colored ceramic tile mosaic. very slippery! people falling and smashing their skulls in, losing their footing and falling into rough bare concrete crevasses: scraped up and trapped. the 'lucky' ones slipping right out of the maze, which is perhaps a worse fate entirely: to lose the chance to reach the maze's end spells purgatory. the guards usher me back to the cage with flashlight beams where the people form a circle around myself and 'the innocent.' the innocent is a hairy disheveled looking young man with piercing eyes. he gives me a kiss.


making pillow talk then with an attractive red headed woman in an impossibly cluttered room. she is an entomologist and we are naked together on a mattress on the floor. she is showing me a collection of ladybug eggs. they start hatching and there are quickly hundreds of them crawling about the bed and between the sheets. she pulls the covers up around us and turns out the light.


lastly on a rotating square house boat. i've come here to stay. i've strewn my clothes all about. the floor is open to the water in the center of the square, like an ice fishing hole. somehow that works. i'm basically running in circles in the direction of the rotation.


i'm wondering if maybe i'm actually a little bit crazy. or a lot crazy even. for a long time i have known something to be true but it's been surprisingly easy to sweep it under the dusty old rug of my brains so that i can carry on pretending something untrue. i suspect this friction of rational and irrational recently made me indistinctly unwell. obsessive fevery dreams haunted me all throughout the night. and night terrors. in which there are hideous ghosts and monsters cruelly tormenting me in my own bed, in my own room. i can even feel the terrible weight of them. and even though the unwell feeling has passed or is anyway passing, i encountered a glowing and hooded one with a dark face in the kitchen last night trying to get a drink of water. and i was very much awake. or thought myself to be.


things have been shitty lately and it's very possible that this friction is at least partly to blame. i don't like what the identification of the friction is doing to me. perhaps i need to admit to myself and everyone else that i have absolutely no idea what i want anymore and i probably never did. anyhow there is very little i can do about it now. i certainly never meant any harm. i certainly want people to know that. and perhaps i will be forgiven in time, i'd certainly like that muchly. but i don't have it in me to beg for that forgiveness now, so i have no choice but to wait and see.


i got to work just in time to hear the very start of "today" by smashing pumpkins. ho, ho! i wanted to drop dead.