november 30, 2000
my life is confusion. i ask what it means and the days reply: living is breathing. golden saxophone keys and fumbling fingers and blue eyes and a love supreme. (trombones are more securely held in this grasp.) silver bells hanging above the door, sterling silver that makes the notes speak mellow and metallic at the same time...hard to describe, like these days going by. it's printed black on white but the page is kinda dirty and some of the ink is hard to see. "that's how it is when you get OUT THERE..."
(i feel i must know my stuff, and know it well. but what IS my stuff?)
it's skateboards, movies, shows, and sore ankles. it's pavement and sky. it's a brick room after the night's chill has gone away. "it's killing me."
"it's holding me."
it's existentialism and progressivism and good ol' rote teaching, you know, the stuff that rilly doesn't work too well once you get OUT THERE.
that place is far down the road, but right outside my door.
and if the inside looks this funky, "i don't wanna leave my bed today."

november 26, 2000
wanted to lift weights tonight, but my arm is screaming. it's pulsating to the beat of music inside me that once was not there.
i hurt myself and scare myself.
i give too much so that it kills me when i reach out to take.
i sat alone last night over a force that could steal my last breath, if i took two steps up and one step over.
still it was deserving of three hours of motion.. shooting through the night, tearing a pathway through the clouds that had fallen to where people wake up and put on their clothes and live their lives. there was haze on the coast and it got into my mind, into my veins, into my eyes, and followed me back here. a week ago god was here, making my coffee taste good, putting flecks of yellow in my eyes and life in my limbs. now this delicate skin is punctured and the fog is leaking out, or sneaking in, spreading out, working its way through.
my soul is saturated. and my veins don't work any more.
i destroy, you destroy, he/she/it destroys....

november 21, 2000
a new fire...a love supreme, a love supreme...but this one isn't just pounded out over long, stocky strings. it's in the rhythm of my step, in the low tone that my voice takes on when i lose it to the hands of an almost- wintertime cold. sleeping, eating, reading in bright places to pass the day away, and lighting candles to push the night's darkness a little bit further from my windows...it's life these days. it's been life, always. and how i love it, even its deep fissures, especially its tall mountains. in a warm place, it wrapped me in its arms...a love supreme...over and over. bathed my thoughts in chocolate coffee, washed my soul in deep purple wine, and filled my eyes with tears of intense gratitude and something else without a name. sundays/tuesdays under clouds or sleet or sun..there it is. there he is. his arms wrap me up each morning to put color back into my cheeks after hours of dreamless rest, and rub my shoulders as i sit in jazz band and in sociology class. it's intensity like pepper. it's the clear of the air. it's the love that makes the sun warm...been making me warm, too, although sometimes in my life my skin has been too numb to feel its heat.

november 20, 2000
lookin for a word...it seems that mr. webster forgot an important combination of letters when he was making that big book of his so long ago. it's a hard message to speak but an easy one to live and feel. it's coffee and pretend wrestling matches in the morning, the warm sunshine that lingers into afternoon, and sweet saxes and trumpets at night. they were playing for a reason, that reason that they could not get into words, that reason woven into the fabric of feeling, the tapestry of thought. there is a light that radiates around the borders of my days, so warm that my mind needs no sweater, so bright that my memory can see and cling to each detail. (nothing is blurred anymore..as it was becoming before.)
lookin for a word, a new word. lookin at this place, all i can say is "mercy, mercy, mercy".

november 16, 2000
some want me to play the virgin in the rite of spring. come fill your eyes with the sight of me, dancing myself to death! let your music catch a choke-hold around my neck once again, till it squeezes the breath from my lungs, pulls the very life from these scarred veins. and then hold me up towards the sky, limp and lifeless, as your trophy, your prize. come embrace these arms and pretend the warmth of blood is still coursing through them, although they have been months and months expired.
"call me a traditionalist, but i'd much rather listen to something with a melody. it's prettier that way."

november 13, 2000
i destroy.
you destroy.
he/she/it destroys.
you all destroy.
we destroy.
they destroy.
in reality, nobody does it like me.