freedom. free`dome. free do me. free do me still.
freedom est (il) liberte.

in this particular july stritch in time, i walked around in circles, in my head and in the street and in the past and took the same shortcut to the future over and over again. i woke you up and you walked with me too in all the same places. my parents followed us in a black truck and like the cusack brand of the silver screen, it started to rain. we kept walking and i kept yelling about the wild west and medical things. & i remember you walking next me like water. you had that same beautiful kind of calm strength that you have, the kind that can slip through fingers and hold up a ship & it was exactly what i needed. the street lights cast our bodies onto the cement street & we saw the same shadows we've seen on those streets since we were 16 years old. isn't so nice to be met with that kind of consistency? the shadows mourn and worry and laugh at absurd things and laugh more at more absurd things for us, like we do- & like we will for eelternity. jenna, thank you for your friendship and your love. happy birthday, my dear friend. i want to be as dependable in your life as midwest club cul-de-sacs and our shadows under the first summer sun and the tan lines that follow. you've talked me down from so many little ledges \\\ & you are the prettiest, miss.hindi. teach your students just a hundredth of what you've taught me and i'd say they're going to do just fine.

3 parts mahmoud darwish, 1 part water from the sea, 1 part joey tribbiani.

on a scale of one to ten, it's a 4 or a 5. the feeling doesn't radiate anywhere and i don't know how to describe it today. nothing makes it feel better or worse & it just started this morning- there i was just a regular ol' would-be peacock feeling insatiable and eating everything when some guy with forceps had the audacity to be this tediously happy person- he wasn't warm at all and certainly had no charisma. you see, doc, it's just that i know a charmless smile when i see one & my god, did he have one...you would have felt angry just looking at him too, but that's all that happened this morning- it wasn't unusual for this place- i know you wanna call it a trigger doc, but it doesn't fit. yes it was the worstttttt being stuck in a charmless moment and all, but it's so expected, after all. charmless with an element of surprise- well that's the worstttt.

6 AM wound around my cul-de-sac like 67 degrees of new york separation at 6:57 PM once upon a fall break until fall break broke. the sky was characteristically lavender, the bricks smelled like laundry and the clouds fell to the ground like mustard and metal.

if he made from water every living thing- we must water every living thing// it is only as i wring my hair into a bun on top of my head, that i piece together what the lion wrote to me & get this mid-morning synapse: we're just smoke and vapour made real by smoke and mirrors. heaven and earth hold us my dear and deceivingly strong boned baby, you supernavae birthed baby, where is your modern cosmic dust? exploding stars breathe fire and life into tough mothers and spiders, both of which are matters for pious proportions. how do you not wonder when atlas will shrug? i wonder if i will shrug first.

medical mnemonics make for dramatic stories- ( see: netterature/netterary studies)

those were a couple of thoughts.

Oh! but, how about these? can you balance them on your head and walk around town?

ladies in labcoats can make even dead men spineless. i did today and i didn't even know his name.

i put in my first IV today and got it on my first try.

i need life like i need grace- it turned out this way somewhere between the mayfield lane trees that bind me to our name. their branches cast shadows on desert skies halfway around the world as the sun sets pink and blue and pompous at noon.
in writing, i tell the stories i hope & wait to someday live or fear i will someday live, but either way, they're moments i tragically anticipate & that makes more sense than anything.
at least today, it does...a leel' bit.
after his weathered back embalmed my fingertips and tired my little body, I teetered for him on a wooden block
& it came to matter.
these bodies are still imprinted with spirits in circular ways and dense regular ways
- we call it dermatoglyphics and these thick skin tricks aren't for kids.
but they are innocent ideas and i guess they feel like hope- or at least reverence.
to revere life in the palm prints of the dead- or to at least feel deeply beautiful things sometimesss is the point today.