you can only say yes

Oh, hello. I'm sorry I've been gone for so long :(

This weekend was unexpected and will probably show up in what I write in multiple ways. I feel older than I did when I posted last. I found a few writing spots and cried more than I normally do. This weekend was so, so unexpected, but it was good.

What if you had done something differently? When I walk by people, I wonder, would you impact me if I gave you a chance? Because when you first meet people, they never seem important. When you met your best friend, I bet you didn't think wow, you and I are going to be ridiculously close one day and I'm going to march into your house for no reason and eat all your food without you getting mad at me sort of. Relationships can't be predicted. Imagine how many relationships you've passed up, the different lives you've inadvertently avoided by disregarding someone who you deemed unimportant. Why do things happen the way they do? It's such a strange phenomenon, when a bond forms, because there's really such a small chance that it will simply because our default expectation is to be acquaintances. No one goes out looking for a best friend or an enemy or a mentor or a lover, so isn't it strange that they manage to happen? And what if you had done something differently, who would you be now? What if I had done something differently?

I used to have a pretty good idea of who reads this but now it's much more vague, and some people who I didn't expect have told me that they follow it. When people talk to me about this blog it is literally the most flattering thing in the world. I love you so much if you are scanning these words. 

I need so desperately for everything to just stop right now so I can go somewhere alone and write with a pen and a pad of paper instead of typing virtual words. I want solid thoughts that I can scratch out with a pen and see and breathe and smell. I want time.

You are everything inside of me that I wish I could be,

Loch.

Ps. Here is a blackout poem I did in poetry today. I thought it would be a more interesting visual. It's a scan but I wrote out the text underneath in case it's difficult to read. Underneath it is the best picture I could find of the painting I did my ekphrastic poem on, and the poem beneath that. The online picture really doesn't do the painting justice, if you go to UT you should go by the Blanton and see it. It's in the modern art section, and I could stare at it for hours. The Dallas Chaos poem has been edited a little bit, but not as much as it needs to be, and the blackout poem has not been edited at all. The picture of Dallas Chaos II is not mine, the painting itself is done by Peter Dean.

(if you click on the picture, a larger version will show up that is easier to read.)

Berl feels

detatched and fatalistic

his life disintegrates. 

Giving freaks a pass is the oldest tradition in Montana,

and he is a blue ribbon, bull goose freak.

Berl's considered medical opinion is that

it will provide a comprehensible shape to his life.

He's the only one who can tell us that,

but I believe him.

Dallas Chaos II by Peter Dean

Dallas Chaos

It is sunny on a saturday. 

I am splayed out across the backseat 

hot leather on my back,

watching Dallas through the windows.

Sky scrapers, horrific traffic,

a city formed from grit and sweat

that makes the South

out of hospitality and smoke ridden skies.

We are out of the car and onto this knoll,

green and bright, unblocked

from the city, but somehow more still.

Here old women cried for a man they hadn't met,

and Jackie took the news that

shook Pennsylvania Avenue like meteors.

Conspiracies circle these skies like vultures,

and John cannot find peace while his name rests on our lips.

But chaos came from down the road,

the police station where a soul's explosion 

broke masks of flesh and bone and blood

revealing a face as ugly as

dogs like pigs that snarl and spit

masked police with hard blue eyes

and media who care for naught but

cold hard facts and hard evening news.

Ruby eyes pierce a soul that breaks

and the solar system circling his head

protects this man in glittered pants and pinstriped suit

who avenged a life and forgot his own.

We stroll sixth floors and grassy knolls,

museums that miss the blue of his beard.

The Ruby red that flooded skies when Oswald died,

Where has it gone?