Sip

I hated coffee today.

[sip]

Woke up in the grey-cold afternoon, trapped between months of 7:30 alarms, and there was nothing that took hold of me. So I raced down a million undetermined options and found no smile breaking the crusted eyelids. The corners of round raccoons that have seen the crevaces between too many unknown sheets.

I'm the secret.

So I figured it was a day for something new. [Sip]

I'm something new.....to myself. So much so that I mock mercilessly the other rings, the other shells, that I've worn-that now lay crusted like ancient newsprint in cream colored heaps about my carpeted floor. My carpeted floor......

Poked the button too many times on a new coffee maker, picked a brand namelessly, and went about a routine pretending. (Familiar?)

Anyone else's routine.

Maybe I can be anybody else.

Because I smoke now, and drink again now, and I drape myself in poet's black.....and haven't ever written anything without a "him" it seems.

I think I hate-don't understand-that sweet "him" of my 21 years.

That, (don't say fairy tale)-that placement of a word, that makes it seem there's love, makes it seems that any of else actually feel.

Feel less, feel normally, that is.

Because I feel the world upon the tiniest hairs, and I want so very much to live the way I hope. To live the way it feels so fucked up and falling........[sip] on the rooftops of every city all at once, reaching with arms stretched out in a near-silenced scream.....when you can be a Prophet, and a Queen, and a jester, and a magician.

[Sip that coffee I still don't like]

Magician, yes we're magicians. We're the magicians that pick-pocket from the push-pin wealthy, with ring-weighted fingers that can dazzzzzzzzzle all the faces of all the children that believe in what we wish to believe in again. They believe in us. (if we ever did)

And us, what do we bring to them?

And them, what did our magicians bring to us?

There was something magical that we did see, in the stars when I looked upon them Christmas Eve, on the fireworks; that catapulted our "imaginations" into Imaginations.

Run, Max Run. Build so many forts. See so many sunrises. Know so many friends. Reallyyy know, without a single conversation devoid of make-believe.

[sip]

I still hate it.

I still hate that I see them all again in the words I've written.

Hate that the clothes will never smell again after the wash, though all those 32 nights were on the fabrics.

Hate what they keep--that they keep, saying that I deserve. Cause its never been there. I kiss all the wrong places hello.

I still hate when I hope. (Don't we all?)

....And where am I ending today? They're leaving--we're leaving, I'M leaving. (Supposed to?) It's all ending, now you've come, and it's all happening!

[Sip. Stir]

Stir it all up for me, tap the wand against each point on the circle. Hoop-stick-pick.....

Pick it up, the smoke filling up throat with cracks.

Crackle-pop-the fire is burning and the cookies swelling. Heat it up and nestle up. Alone?

There's so many logs in that fireplace.

There's so many things we'll never do. There's so many things we WILL.

__Daily headphones: David Gray's "Please forgive me" , William Fitzsimmons's "I dont feel it anymore (song of the sparrow)", and Fleet Foxes "White Winter Hymnal"

< photo by Paul Nouge.