batman and robin

somebody was doing something she shouldn't have been. and someone else probably put her up to it.

ghost

the price this poet pays

only Silence hears my laughter.
in a dark place, i choke on pride.
Reflection renders my body to the years
that your silence has consumed.

at the breathing cluttered center
of it all is a terrible stillness.
Nothing stirs the dust.
my screams don't touch a feather.
tornadoes of my words hardly part the grass.
i stare, trying to wipe the slate clean.

now more than then, i feel the fallen world.
now more than then, i walk a rotted plank
between the road and the lost home.

i scrape charred ashes from my belly
and write a letter to Nobody.

i write in a language that
i cannot read.

ghost

thought drift

i lie in bed after a day alone, a day of work broken up by text conversations, but no real human contact.  i lie in bed and let my thoughts drift, really drift, not pulling the reigns even when the threads become twisted. drift. and think of a cloud i saw earlier in the day that looked a lot like my mother's face. i wonder what she would look like now. she's been gone so long. drift. and catch a snippet of a tune from long ago, a song lost to me now. it meant so much to me then.

these are nights i wrestle with my conscious, and his brothers sub and un. there's a certain freedom there, a freedom to let down my guard for more than five minutes, a freedom to not feel the need to perform perpetual psychic housekeeping, to let the floor of my imagination sprout weirdness after weirdness. it's a sort of awake dreaming.

the text notification rings and i'm brought out of my semi sleep. it takes me a moment to gather the parts of my mind scattered through the astral plane.

it's all madness, the text reads.

no, madness is a serious commitment, i reply.

 

ghost

pages

there are pages unwritten in my soul, turned daily.
what we scribble down just to remember is sometimes immortal.
we often stare at a blank page, frozen by its potential.

ghost

this is my idea of romantic

when i saw this, i couldn't help the big smile that crawled across my mug.

ghost

catalyst

the first work of graffiti i remember seeing, the one that struck a chord with me, and really, influenced me to venture into "street art" was some sign on a wall in an abandoned lot in midland, texas. it was bright and beautiful, and it shined a light into what was a young, angry, emo before there was such thing as emo mind. it read, "i just feel like something wonderful is about to happen." i'm remembering that now because that feeling just breezed through me. it wasn't huge, but it was like this ball of hope rolled through me. ever get those? it's odd that it happened as i was considering a project, a creative project. i don't know that the feeling will bring about anything wonderful. i don't know. maybe something wonderful will happen. maybe soon.

hope is one of those things you can never have too much of. even if it's stupid. unless of course, you're hoping someone dies. i think it's all about kindness, after all. i remember reading somewhere that simple kindness is the most noble of human aspirations. hope and kindness. if you put those two together, if you can aspire truly to these two ordinary ideals, if you can hope when times are hopeless, if you can show kindness when all around is cruelty, if you can do them to the utmost, these two things become extraordinary. i think they have a name for people like that. i think they call them saints.

i'm no saint. and you probably aren't either. are you? this is my own graffiti though, for those of you still reading this:

something amazing is happening to someone right now. you just might be next.

sometimes life is good, after all.

 

ghost

Day Number 13149

so, i'm 36 today.

over halfway to 70. i will live, on average, a little longer again as long as i have lived so far. but let's be honest, up until now has been a pretty long time.

am i getting old?

i'm closer to 40 than i am to 30. and 40 is an oddly scary number. i've never really cared about aging. i mean you only have two choices in the matter. either you do or you're dead.  but 40 is a little intimidating. maybe it wouldn't be if it weren't a...a...wait a minute...if it didn't go into...if 100 weren't so easily divided by...

i used to know the word for that, for what 36 is relative to 100. looks like the queue is full. i never used to forget words or names or faces.

maybe i am getting old.

 

ghost

what the...

so yesterday my little ones and i were spending the afternoon inside, doing our utmost to avoid the 109 degree heat that was cooking everything outside. hercules, the animated feature, not that terrible series from the 90s, was on and it caught my kids' attention as i flipped through the rubbish that is daytime television. with nothing better on or to do, we settled in with some popcorn and some rootbeer. 

at one point hercules is battling this really evil looking dragon monster. pixie was unsettled by this monster, which never happens. she spent the next few minutes with her head buried in my chest.  as i'm sitting there watching, the monster eats the hero. then, the hero cuts the monster's head off. from the inside. the beheaded neck crashes limply to the ground, the severed spine and raw meat on full display to the viewers. i was stunned.

are you kidding me?  this is a kids' cartoon? frightening monsters and severed heads? visually torn flesh? i think a lot of kids must have had nightmares after watching this movie.

and it wasn't finished.  the beheaded monster sprouted three new heads, which herucles also cut off. it sprouted dozens more. i'll tell you, that scene was a hundred times more scary than any of the nightmare on elm street movies.

so i wake up this morning, and guess what. guess who had a nightmare. a nightmare in which some shadowy figure on a school bus on a dallas overpass severed the driver's head with a lightsaber and terroroized my students before i wrestled the lightsaber away from him and cut his arm off at the shoulder, leaving a wound that looked exactly like the monster's severed head from hercules.

ridiculous.

 

ghost

morning greys

shadows shift as i wake.
what i dreamed leaks out of my grasp.
sunlight moves in, crowding out
the sleep from behind tired eyes.
to work, to beat the drum.
life is short, but the day is long.

ghost

home?

this house, this space in which i live is not my own.  looking around, i've found lately i'm not comfortable here anymore.  i've tried cleaning up, straightening up as much as three young children will allow. i've tried rearranging and stacking, but the fact of the matter is, while i've talked about painting the walls and other improvements that desperately need to be made, i have been less than motivated to make them. maybe i wasn't ready to make them.  maybe in the back of my head somewhere i wasn't through with it the way it is.  

but that's apparently changed.

i look around and none of it is mine, my choice, my idea, my style. all of it is ruins of the past. 

one of the problems is that i don't really have an eye for interior design. but some ideas have been churning lately.  that and the constant discomfort make me think it's probably time to do work.

time to funk stuff up.

 

ghost 

the road

my kids and i return from a playdate and card game at my buddy's house a bit ago.  i hadn't expected them to last the drive home, but they are wide awake and hungry, so i whip up a couple of grilled cheese sandwiches. as they finish their snack and i clean up the mess, Pixie crawls up in a chair and  tells me i am, "the best cooker," and then gives me a small kiss on the cheek.

fast forward and they are getting settled in for sleepy time and i am curled up at the foot of their bed, just a presence in the darkness to put their minds at ease and help them fall asleep.  i'm drifting when i feel a small hand pat my back. Tiny Tank gives me a hug and says, "you're a good daddy."

and it occurs to me that no matter what comes, no matter what sacrifices have to be made, no matter what i have to endure, it's all worth it, people.

 

ghost

hold onto your truth

sometimes it seems as if your truth won't stay, won't last. you have to hold it tight, weld it on. and even then your conviction wanes so easily. two arguments shake it loose. it's not that i think you weak, just easily defeated.

better that i speak plainly, not imbuing flavor to dust.

 

ghost

any given moment

believe it or not, someone somewhere is listening to imagine by john lennon. for example, i am. 

talk about odds. and dirty minds. ok let's say there are three hundred million people in the u.s. and canada. i'm sure there are more, but let's say three hundred million for a nice round number. for argument's sake let's say a third of them are really old and a third are really young. that leaves a hundred million. one hundred miillion. fifty million couples eligible to be engaged in highly personal situations at any given time.

if the average couple has sex eight times a month, that means there is a one in three and three fourths chance, we'll say one in four, that a particular couple is. so any given day, twelve and a half million couples are going to knock boots in the u.s. and canada. that means 520,833 couples per hour are initiating sex. that means 8,681 couples per minute. one hundred forty five couples per second. every second, 145 pairs of pants are unbuttoned or bras are unclasped.

so if every couple averages fifteen minutes per episode, and incidences of sex are spread evenly throughout the day, that means that as we speak, 130,215 couples are getting it on. in the u.s. and canada.

as to what the odds are that one of those couples is listening to imagine while they are having sex, i have no idea. i do know that i am not.

 

damn, i'm lonely.

 

ghost

cover tune

the other night i had this dream that i skipped three of my classes for about five straight weeks, and because it had been so long since i had attended, i was was kind of embarrassed to even show my face. i didn't want to deal with the disdain from the professors or try to catch up on five weeks of material before the finals for the classes. i just knew i was going to fail at least one of the classes and therefore wouldn't graduate.

the only problem with this dream is that i graduated eleven years ago.

it is not the first college dream i've had since i graduated either. and they've all been set at a place that looks almost, but not entirely like my college. in the dream it's a dark place with a somewhat gothic look rather than the sundrenched southwestern motif of the actual college. it makes me wonder where we get our dream sets. not only does my brain create this fictitious campus, but it reuses it. it's a familiar place, and i always know where to go. it's not like my brain doesn't know what the real campus looks like. so why doesn't my dream set approximate the real deal?

our dreams are like cover tunes. our brains take the original and reconfigures it with a slightly different flavor and markets it as not the original but maybe just as good. this new flavor is one we might not even know exists. but it does. it must.

i don't know about you, but i always seem like i'm much smarter in my dreams than i am in reality. it makes me believe that it is possible that the human brain is capable of more than we've seen so far. i don't know if i'd go as far as telepathy, but then why not?  we're just complicated electrical wiring, aren't we?

 

ghost

last day

shiny fake baubles adorn all of your fingers. a couple dozen or more silly bands lining each wrist like some sort of rainbow armor. smudged eyeliner. spike haired and just now growing the balls to use curse words in front of others. high school halls, a shrine of profanity.

and the first time you utter the word "f*ck", it's under your breath and directed toward me? i'll tell you a secret. i'm far from sugar-and-spice and everything nice, little girl.

i hate to see anyone crying, but don't push me. 

 

ghost

season finale

"it's all so stupid. just f*cking stupid. stupid."-m.k.
"do you work for the department of redundancy department?"-c.a.

"everyone always says i'm so soft."-d=rv
"you're like a baby's a$$."-a.d.

"hey this is a taco and burrito conversation. nachos."-c.m.

"tip, standing on the table like that, you look like a m!dget. a ninja m!dget."-c.a.

"i need something small and pointy to make a hole. can i borrow a pen?"-c.r.
"use your pen!s. i hear it's small and pointy."-k.c.

"die. in. a. hole."-k.t.

"tip, your on an undefinable wave length."-zack the red

"don't look now, but i think you're going to h*ll for blasphemy."-c.a.
"is that a fat joke?"-j.h.

"no, tip. i'm not doing that. please go die."-b.h.

"hey, i've got an idea. go shoot yourself."-j.p.

"we're talking about unicorns. you're not a f*cking unicorn scientist."-j.l.

 

ghost