[raise high the roofbeams. the catcher's in the rye]

Okay, okay. Now, I don't want to pretend to know The Way of Things. Or to say that the hard gets easier, when it doesn't. Where are Rod Caufield, or Franny and Zooey Glass, when we need them? Salinger's agents of the unpretentious, calling out the phony to disown it.

On East Mountain today, we walked the road along which the Tea Fire (has it been over three months already?) swept. The cloud-strewn ocean and Santa Cruz islands, the very ones where once the dolphin-girl made her way, shone blue in the distance. Walking, Stacey turned toward me. It's too short, she says. Words falling out of the blueness. It, this, is too short.

And I, I who would even dare to turn away from the ocean, glittery and captivating as it is: I know what she means.

a little of what's been on my mind

(09 February 2009)

Remembering that streaming, dirty creek to ocean at filthy Sugar Beach, La playa pan de azucar, as I cross campus bridge over already slowing-to-a-trickle creek, the rushing, unstoppable water of the past days having reached the Pacific at the bottom of the hill.

I crossed that garbage-strewn creek near a group of loud and rowdy Ticos, beach campers who felt a little drunken, like everything else in that town. On the edge of madness, violence. A tourist, souvenir shop and cervecería wonderland, Pinocchio's Pleasure Island. I crossed near them cautiously, taking care on the steep sandy walls of the creek bank, picking my stepping stones with precision. (Who doesn't want to get wet at a beach? I'm telling you, not this creek. Not this playa). And there, nearby, all floppy and opulent, a colorless greyish white in the sand, lay a long dead snake. Pink and rubbery, maybe three, four feet long, twisted sickeningly. Now I'm not one to fear snakes, but seeing this bloated body made my stomach turn, limp like the penis of the man mauled by a grizzly in the photo I didn't mean to see.

I don't know why I'm writing this, really, except walking back from the library tonight, singing snatches of Radiohead softly, I noticed the water, the bridge, the quick and strong and finally fleeting rains. Only You can heal a barren land. Only turn toward us.

i just want you to know

that i do still write poems (oh, many), and i will start sharing them again (yes, soon).

and that the One is good, whose name is from ages past, and Love endures.

and, even in homework and overwhelming times like this,

we will make it.

Radiohead - House of Cards

and even six years after my younger self started to listen,
you are still so good.

i never thought i'd say this,

but somehow fires catch my eye more, now. pray for australia.

01.23.09 [on the occasion of the author's 21st birthday]

okay, so, truth be told, i have not felt this young for many, many years