Sometimes when I reread something I've written I cannot recognize myself in it. I always feel like I am a teenager again reading posts by Kate Gervais and sometimes feeling better, always feeling understood, being two of the same person just to have somebody else to talk to.

I feel these blues happening and trying to drown me but I forget how to do that by myself--- which I think is good. Still don't know how to talk about it which is not as good. Everything was good except for me. If Peter lets me through the gates, I think I will just hug God and tell him how sorry I am for not loving myself. I thought about that in the car when everyone was worrying about somebody else's problem... but the difference is I've never had anyone else to pretend to blame, maybe.

I'm talking in circles because I need to talk to somebody and I'm realizing the only person I really know how to talk to is myself. Where does that put me?

I'm always talking about myself, even when it has nothing to do with me.

Nothing more than moving my bed and the purr of Cat Power's vocals matching my sadnesses, all it takes for me to cry you a river. I'm worried over nothing. Starting to get bored because I'm not moving any mountains. And this damn song has played like four times in an hour and I just feel like you're all following me in a dream and we're holding hands screaming insecurities and crying together. I've been with one man for nearly 8 months and haven't seen him cry once and to me this resonates as failure. I don't know where I am right now... I was just sitting here so mad that my room smelled bad and I ended up pushing everything around and shoving my bed and crying over nothing and maybe a lot of things and remembering that for the last week how heavy I've felt and how I don't know who to talk to that would be appropriate. I feel like I'm crushing myself with concern and I tried to tell you without saying anything and I remember how that never works. And I kill myself wondering why they never read my writing or why the cat decided to pee on the only thing I feel like I wanted to save forever (even though it was under a bunch of other stuff in my room. I feel like I can't keep doing this kind of crying because I am always alone and I feel like that's not what this is for. I don't know what my problem is.

If I'm being honest, I'm not unhappy. I'm just so overwhelmed of never telling people things that actually matter. Even when I was playing therapist, I don't feel like I was telling you anything. I just wonder if it is me indeed or if people don't want to know me that way? I know its not anyone else's fault. It just feels like I've really written my whole story so wrong. And I just want to feel like I'm really loved for being the person I am and not for being this half person all the time.

I just don't know what I'm supposed to do about it.

I feel sad, and like there isn't much I can say.

Jibba Jabba

These are last year's songs. These don't have the same words anymore, though it feels like they do maybe.

At some point, he looked at me and told me not to look at him like that. I asked "like what?" even though he knew. And he told me that I already knew, but he knew I was going to ask when he said it. He said he'd been good. I knew what he meant, but I didn't say anything. I am two people on one swing. I am three people scared of how to talk to one other person. I am a small child screaming into the sky wondering why I was born alone. I am staring into you and reading your heartbreak. I am your number one believer. I am sure we'd fall back in love if you came too close. I am a million years away from being loved. I am scared of good people. I am happy when I don't have time to complicate my life. I feel good dancing in your shadow, but feel embarrassed and unoriginal. There are different versions of me crying myself to sleep. I am sitting in the back of the Oldsmobile writing poetry and wishing you would miss me. I am smelling something I hate talking about. I am getting out of jail free with this orange or green card, but I can't remember which one. I am older. I am dreaming that I am having a lucid dream where I am forcing myself to write down this one dream I had last night in the dream. It didn't remind me of the word inception until I told someone else about it outloud and felt unoriginal. I think about Matt Sherling every time I'm grooving on poetic wavelengths. I write that down. I am praying to God. I am scratching my arms. I am yelling in sync with orphans and circus clowns. I am laughing. I might still be crying. I am learning differences. I am worried about passionate love and dutiful love and named my cat Clarissa because I am justifying my life. I am offended. I am smarter than these girls so I tell you I may come around in time, even though I am just watching three hours of tv I don't even think I like. I am dreaming of naked girls. I am listening to time pass, in case it has a good soundtrack. I am singing along to this Justin Bieber song while Neil Young reminds me of independence. I am loving the sound of fingers on keyboard. I never meant to betray you. I'm still not sure if I have. This is the first I've thought of you during this moment. I still feel guilty for things you did wrong. I am not sure what that says about me. I want to have homework. I wouldn't know how to be a wife. There are ghosts in my hair whispering on my neck about beauty and disgrace. This is coming home. This is terror or glamour. Man made divinity.

I could do more.

"Something you can't see or hear or touch or smell: OK. All right. But something you can't even feel? Because that's what he feels when he tries to understand something to really sincerely pray to. Nothingness. He says when he tries to pray he gets this like image in his mind's eye of the brainwaves or whatever of his prayers going out and out, with nothing to stop them, going, going, radiating out into like space and outliving him and still going and never hitting Anything out there, much less Something with an ear. Much much less Something with an ear that could possibly give a rat's ass."

From Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace.

Because I've been watching so many videos and having conversations of thoughtfulness

Trying to compile a list of intimate equidistances, somewhere lost between where I found you and where I came from, walking backwards on my hands, which is more like forewards afterall, and all I can do is apologize for not remembering how to love you more. I cant explain what I'm trying to do because I'm not sure that I'm trying to do much of anything, other than try to try my best or something resembling effortless happenings. There's nothing much I can do to adjust the prefixes, adjust my "past" as they keep referring to it as, forgetting that its happening all the time. Do you remember the first time it happened? Crossing over rocky mountain tops and letting the Allman Brothers wake me up first class or last class, or late to class maybe, all I remember is a song of letting things go, moving forward, pushing on. This is the inspiration. This is the poetry. This is the nakedness of everyone I've ever said "I love you" to. I'm never sorry for forgiveness and I'm not sorry for the rest of it either, but words hurt like bee stings that don't happen --- perpetual paranoid and papercut fingers. I remember how proud I was when I could tell my mom how to drive to the library, her pretending she'd forgotten the way just to give me something to do. I remember this and remember poetry and remember pretending like its the only thing, and I dont know how I forgot this before. There's something missing in you now, but I know where to find it. I just don't know how, how to turn left or make an appearance that makes an apparent difference. You grew a beard and I could barely recognize your immense cheerfulness. Given the arithmetic, I am reminded of my inability to cause joy and my lack of bandages. But then I look to the sky, bright blue and pregnant with rainclouds and I am lost in something more apparent that all these problems I had to excavate from my loved ones. I'm not a sorry person, but I'm sorry for being the person I have been--- sometimes. Not today. Today I'm fine. Today is a feeling

because matthew reminded me of carrollton, i reminded me of b.c.

brighted blue skin astringent smells like five weeks in spain and missing perfect teeth. somewhere between locked eyes and me telling my lover lies, i remember what wasn't waiting for me back home, in georgia, where it was probably raining, like it didn't for five weeks--- at least, it wasn't raining to me. but spanish is hard for me to grasp, even harder back then, muffled between locked lips above metro entryways, mapped out in picasso's confusion, or dressed on cream cheese pizza... noise and noise and beautiful noises reminding me that nothing, even a good thing, makes sense. but maybe spanish rain is dry, like the way my eyes were that summer, the summer of refusal, the summer of turning off the lights in order to hear someone else. farah's big brown eyes made me feel loved and understood, even though she is my opposite- how my little cosmo is now. something like understanding the impossibility of this is what made me forget how badly i wanted to forget other things. today, this is what i remember.

i feel like i deserve to be missed more. i know this is selfish, i guess.

Don't go so deep looking for tears - those ones will never matter. The ones that are to worry about will float to the top anyway. He will tell you what the Fear is in this one. And you will talk about how you can't hear about it. And you will realize that what you thought the Fear was isn't quite it at all. And you realize that he is simple, in a wonderful way. And that it's so lovely that his Fear makes sense. And when he is gone, you cry yourself to sleep because you don't know what yours is. And he'll tell you you're looking for something that isn't there. And so you do that, in case you missed something. And suddenly you are shredding journals for cocaine pages and praying to God for big silences and tears in locked closets and under some mechanic's fingernails. But you remember Tom Waits before anyone told you about him... and you remember when he laid in the middle of the road you knew exactly what was going on. And sometimes that is the point. To remember the you without the other and to remember that you aren't the same but that still exists within you. And it is all choice and chance and chaos and coffee and apologies and forgiving yourself for not knowing how to overlook the lookout. But know at the end of the day, the most beautiful thing in the world is knowing that no matter how many times you give it away, it never runs out. And if you don't believe me, ask God next time you're about to eat breakfast.

If I can have a moment of reality here, none of that is necessarily saying something directly about me. If you know me, you know this is how I write, how I go, how I think. One thing to something big to nothing about me. But of course it's all relative. But I did want to say something really straight forward... and that is I would have stayed up just to make you feel better, and I came over just to make you feel a little better, and that somehow even without being in the same room, I felt like that was the most beautiful experience I've ever had in Love, and with you. Just knowing it was a good thing for me to be there... I hope you know what I mean. Contrary to popular belief, I never say what I mean ;)

And on and on...

I ain't writing no more of these damn reviews about poets and poems I didn't want to read. Get me out of this place where words are turned into something sinister, remind me why we practice writing with our right hands, write only to write off the ones whose writing isn't enough for us to manipulate and turn into something good enough for you. If I've told you once, I've told you a time or two that nothing is ever as confusing as it could potentially, depending on the weather, seem or feel or what is that word on the fifteenth page of the dictionary next to a picture of some Eden fruit that sort of looks like a greener kind of pineapple but with a different hairstyle... Wait... was that a question? Questioning whether or not it qualifies might be the problem in the first place because every good man knows that when you ask a drug addict which was is up, he's going to point to his insides and mumble sorry and i just miss eating birthday cake and tears are just as good as bottled water. There's no point to much of anything except forgiving people who tend to forget to apologize when their anger gets the best of them. We can't help how we feel so we rub each others hands together, press fresh fingertips crimson covered and wet along each others, and apologize for practice because marriage gets boring. There's nothing wrong here, with you or me, or the way things are. All we must do is see things differently they tell us every time. So Lorraine and I raise our hands to the sky and force our legs to defy gravity, scream as the toes dance in the air, return to the ground. Little ones, little ones. It's not normal to feel good. That's a good way to think about things. Another thing to consider is that it's not really garbage if you just bury it behind the sage bushes in the backyard and don't tell anyone about it. I wonder where Jeff is now, and if he's still wandering around Berkeley leaving notes for people he has no intention to meet, if he stopped smoking herb in favor of starting over. It's not like you changed my life - you just changed everything else. My hair turned gray when we met. So I cut it all off and planted it in the middle of People's Park and you can go there to this day and you'll see sage bushes and hummingbirds and homeless humming words to that song we can't remember the tune of exactly. HE WILL REMIND YOU is carved along his shoes, filled in slightly with crimson and birthday cake and little ones, little ones.