Stratospheric Doldrums

A creamy white swirled by gray, a jellyfish plume cut into the foreground, this is the sky I see today. A curious sensation of drowning in air.

Road

Carving out a road, carving it slightly different from the rest. That's what we do. Our road is many roads cut through many sets of trees, mine an unpainted tar path that winds through the thick pines of a national woodland and you will pass me in sneakers and a dirty tanktop. No, fine sand shooting off from right-angled corners, through a bamboo forest, a rock garden somewhere in the middle of all this where you sit barefoot and meditate, or draw a tiger in the sand, an image you will destroy when it is finished. Or a slippery path of sand dunes and a gentle but unruly bramble of panic grass and sea oats surrounding and crossing the path.  The sky blacker and stars milkier and gleaming brighter than any other spot we know. You stand at the edge of the black ocean, the edge of the long, cool sand, land and ocean and sky nearly indistinguishable, and though I am afraid you embrace me and pull me carefully under. There are many roads, each person's road is slightly different, and though I have several mine are all the same road.  You know the secret, that you are the cause of the sameness of paths. That the reason my roads are one road is because at the end of each is you, waiting for me to find my way.

Flightless Bird, American Boys

How much ground is lost over a lifetime on useless legs, one in front of the other, so fragile and small. Like a glass figurine bird who has lost its way home.  Shuffled here and there in a crowd of patriots.  Easily lost, stepped on.  Dirtied with the mud of their boots.  They're all going the same direction down the sidewalk, non-descript buildings hugging their shoulders.  A sliver of sky peeks between their tops.  But the bird does not know how much or how little of the sky peeks between the buildings, because while the patriots do nothing but crane their necks, point their noses upward, laugh and discuss the rain or the cloudless blue or Apus/Aquila, they cannot ever see him, who passes beneath them and does not look up.

A puppy song for my neighbors

Whining, always whining is this puppy who is new and who wants to know the answer, though the answer she wants is not the answer to a question, but the answer to a shape, a shade of grey, a yearning to be lifted into arms. The answer is warmth, an atrophy of which leaves her head hung submissively over the edge of the couch back, waiting for a coming together of bodies.

Her gulf stream

An attempt to be happy beneath a rusting beacon. The temporariness of a finger's touch, a pressing thing. As the skin changes there is anger in the white left behind. White like island sand in shearing late afternoon sunlight, transitioning soon to a deep orange and then to sleep. Like sand forever shaped by the hug of the gulf's piel suave, blanca.

Written Behind the Turbine of Engine # 2

Anonymity maintained. No image comes to mind this time, and you can shove your other senses into a wastebasket fire of white noise. Accelarant boy, sidekick to the solar storm, haha never see it coming. Gathering words and abstracting concepts neither of us fully understands, not until sleep catches us lying down on our backs. Ready to be penetrated with a deep and lasting silence. Some of them say we wear masks to hide our faces painted in the blood of our fellow animals. We try to tell them, these are not masks. Trailing smoke in a downward corkscrew with flame like a ray of light from the clouds to the earth. It is with the wind of final approach sweeping across our blank looks.

Declaration

I am a bull, after all. Cornered, sometimes. Killing, sometimes. Sometimes killed. I am a patriot. Taste of grain and blood and dirt. Breathing in the dusty Spanish air, el aire de España. Exhaling sulfur, charcoal, potassium nitrate. Viva España. Viva el toro. There is a war, a tauromaquia, and there is an enemy, torero. After all, I am a bull.