On a promotional postcard over lunch, alone

There's a loveheart in the foam of my coffee holding together this table in a dry place w. untrimmed verges, concrete chipping into the asphalt.

I blame the drought so I drink like fishes do, which is to say they don't.

The fluff is falling scentless from trees so we're all fucked. Let's sing along, we're all fucked.

How or why to write a poem? At least I'll leave the word 'alienation' out, too many places to go at night. Sex helps, but brave new bodies close all around like doors and I've stopped knocking. There are just too many places, or at least one with psychedelic carpet and guitars dangerous as cats.

How are you dancing? It's not falling but we don't quite make it. This music is lidocaine and I'm spread thin between the floor and the ceiling.

At work, on no paper at all

Names for sensations slip out then slip away again. I've been awash in words for the past few hours and I'm making a habit of it; I suck them in then spit them out again without too much thought.

I saw a dead duck on the side of the road today. A mallard duck laid out on the kerb like one of those old oil paintings of the Fruits of the Harvest. He was soft and perfectly, wholly intact in the way only birds can be. It occurred that birds must be dying all the time but you only rarely see their bodies, or comparatively rarely given the number of birds and the number of bird corpses I've seen. And I looked at the small birds flying over my car, wheeling and diving with the kind of integrity and wholeness only birds can have, a little differently. Their bodies end up crumpled and riddled with ants, they soak and disintegrate in the rain, like trash.

Thinking it again another sensation shudders through me but the name is too quick, I don't catch it and I'm floating on a sea of words, ideas I look at passively. I suck them in and spit them out again, I suck them in and spit them out again.

Amen, amen, amen.

The pieces of paper set out by library computer carrels for writing Dewey numbers on

In front of a computer carrel I sit and sweat and grow steadily pinker. A boy (at what age will I start calling them 'men'?) asks me how last week was. I don't remember him. It dawns slowly that he may have been the boy I thought attractive at a concert I went to.

He doesn't seem too attractive now, and (not for the first time) I wonder what I was thinking.

The air conditioning recirculates dozens of different deodorants, perfumes & colognes evaporated off dozens of different skins, and they rise and meld, powdery and chemical. I wish I could come up with something better than the disappointment rising in me like damp, but you write what you know. I've come here to read about the crusades for a short story I'm writing. I'll take the books from the shelves and press them to my face. I'll breathe in paper and mildew until I forget I've ever smelled skin. I'll pile them high, rest my head, and forget.

On a laptop, sour with sweat, after remembering this 'blog exists

My jeans are stained with strawberry juice, printer ink and coffee. Does this say much about my personality? I think it says a lot about my jeans.