modern memory

Who can trace the contours of memory's face. She sits in my backpack and at the first chance leaps into the strands of my hair. I coif my remembrances day by day. I run a brush through my golden strands and

in August when time was running out and the sun had almost given up but was still pushing for the big win, your Suzuki Swift bore me away on gravel roads and nervousness. your arm under my back. am I hurting you. can I cut off your circulation for one more stalled moment. courage was the summer and I am overdue. getting by with a few late fees and the thrill of procrastination. never lost sight of the possibility. possibility. possibility. giving over is such work when I am out of practice. I write my name on your identity and scrawl the time on the window of your suv precursor. 1:30 am. a record. the wind is picking up and we're all out of cookie dough. I managed to not fall off your roof but

we couldn't avoid the awkwardness of a hatchet at the top of a hill and the mention of a big-time m.o. from the greatest b crush of all time. no fell'ing in the Swift. none at Vespers. it is before my indoctrination and it still lingers as a hope near my brain stem. chills down the spine like falling off the roof at midnight outside your sister's window shining the artificial light of childhood narcissism down on your shoulders and blotting out the clock.

I've started to wear my hair down for the sake of these. working a ponytail goes nowhere on the road to self-experience. the scent changes, and mini-me-memory enters my nose as well as my scalp and

sitting on the 104 at 9:43 in '06 I recall the scent of you on the hood of your car which was the scent of Mexican laundry detergent which is the scent of the man in front of me. rotund and smells clean. yellow shirt. dazzling buttercup and I Never Saw Another Butterfly. there is a pull to ask him how he launders. there is a more logical more frightening more misleading pull to ask you how I hurt you, my picture on your dash with phallic popsicle and naïveté. there is guilt in the water and it laces our clothes. your sister telling me the words you never could and me crying tears for your sake. wanting to be the shoulder I never wanted to be when I was a shoulder. a breast when I had none. assurance when I couldn't see it staring me in the heart. but not caring really not at all not ever not ever, really.

Memory falls, dandruff towards my backpack, never as poetic as snow on flammable cedars.

self-caffeinated free association

I know I shouldn't, but I do. The mantra thuds in the background as the anthem rings out true: maybe this time it's different.
Yes. It is a question of earned reticence. Yes. It's a question of lessons learned. But life is hope, Highness.
So I wrap myself in cables that imitate the weight of human tissue, cables that carry all our knowledge, a posteriori or otherwise. They can choke, I've seen them do it, and even a priori it's not hard to imagine. But as the Sexton once said, it is a sweet weight, this weight that presses my feet into the soil and roots me in the truth of possibility. Imagination is my gateway drug in the afternoon, and I sink from surface to soil to the soul's opium dream.
I don't sleep anymore; I float on a cloud of orange anticipation above my yellow notepad forever in the night. I produce my own caffeine, better than the dregs from a Japanese factory floor stained by adjacent dynasty and pantheistic tendencies forgotten.
This heart pitters and patters, but it sees enough to think clearly through the arrest. Or at least kaleidoscopically—
a new image emerges from the patchwork refractions and I see myself reflected
mewling in newness
in its arachnid eyes.