dear alright already

yeah alright, ok? alright already -- ok? 

yes it's true. i have been meaning to write to you and for so long that it's grown to embarrass me, ok? even when i happen to think of it, still it pains me --  but of course, i do anyway. but so finally i have sat down now and said "enough" and "it's about time now" and "it will be okay to sit here." it's time to sit down in front of it here and to have a look and a good peer at it.

so -- here i am, see? how do i look? 

wait -- don't answer that 

(i forgot you were blind) -- ....  see? 

the thing starts up again just like that... 

-- alright already! -- alright!

let me think of that one perfect day we spent together so long ago, can you remember it? how many of those days you think we have left in this life? can't be too many cus that one was certainly special. and i remember the sun shining all over me and i'm siting on the roof playing the guitar in the sun all cheerful. do you remember that day? a blood red robin sang out to us from the tall evergreen back of us and those bright squishy notes gushed all down our ears and ruined our clothes. it's been moments like those where i've felt most god-like and invincible in this life. 

and you wouldn't guess it but, since we last spoke, i went and developed a big old clocktower coming right out my goiter. blam thing tells the time and everything. i tell you it came as quite a shock the morning i awoke to the tolling of bells banging round in my old clanger. what they used to call a "wake up call" when alarm clocks were new and the only alarm you knew was waking up in a cold sweat and praying to the gods it was actually time to get up. 

because maybe it's you were sleeping away from the phone or dozing off  with the old chin tucked and the drool flashing like wild salmon. it used to be i could tell time. and now it's time that tells me. tells me things like  "enough - alright already! - ease up, won't ya?" it used to be i could stare up straight at the sun and just say "the time is this" or "the time is that" and then i'd keep walking. now this ol time-keeping device is ticking with a pulse unheard since momma's womb, since the first tide ever flowed and you arrived to us like a little bibby in a shoebox. that's how old it feels -- like a worn out pair of leather shoes with two black tongues lolling out.

i'm listening to the eraserhead soundtrack for the first time as i write you. i'm remembering 10 years ago i wrote a surrealist poem about david lynch before seeing any of his films. the  music was and is familiar to me kind of like when humming machinery enters a room that no one's talking in. and you know what, it's about time i listened to this smothered work and to shake it down the canals in true reptilian fashion. to which i have finally learned to say "yes ok" and "fine it's fine" and also "alright already" to the sound of its flopping down my canals like a so many salmon scrambling upstream.

i used to have this reoccuring dream as a child where it was the never the same thing twice. and you didn't know it was a dream till you were in the middle of it. because the way it started was always the same: it would just be super super quiet and nobody was ever around. after a long time of nothing something would happen -- like something, just something but it would repeat itself again and again. so then there would be two and then four of these propagates and then more and still and still until the whole sky and everything in it was filled up and blocked out. no sky, no light, just being inside of something. and sometimes the dream kept going and it'd be as if i was enmeshed in this inescapable fabric. trapped staring at mundane angles of the propogated thing without moving. 

like once, i remember i was at the fish market in san pedro and i started to feel a pressure behind my ears ....

flies. swarming and blocking out the sky 

and i'm in the middle, like a dark pillar of a man

raising my arms over my head, dropping flies

i open my mouth to scream but i choke & gag 

you're right, something must have happened to my DNA. perhaps it was damaged in the journey or perhaps while skateboarding. i thought it would be easier than it was. but this is where i am now and i suppose that will be my first assumption.

Love, 

Central City Libraries