that night, it rained moments of my life till i was drenched in details and the mattress became a life raft. there was as much below my heavy head as up above. what is ours floated to the surface and into thin air. sentiments about daylight and the fact that manhattan, too, was once just a forest where flowers bloomed in the darkness rang true and loud in my ear- it woke me up from my rented sleep in this rented home. i stayed up to wonder about the injustice of city gardens and to imagine us as teenagers by roman fountains. i thought about how i loved how we explain the world to each other; i loved how we laughed and how we loved, over and ever again. but i know the pictures we took were already outliving us. i imagined them in a hundred years in stowed boxes overflowing like a faucet & our memories pouring out into the hands of our city kin.

i saw the whole thing from the grass where i lied while you laid. the ring around the moon meant rain was coming to us soon too.

fool about town. break down about time. i just miss the airport and the whole thing is exposing and unfit for winter. girls catch colds in temperatures like these.

pretty girls sit in a west side bank safe looking for trouble and treasure.

Old friends collect like constellations in a sky full of starry storytellers and say, "do you remember when...?"

your calm keeps me up all night. it is the summer of pink elephants and in between two cities of fourteen hills is the sea where i keep secrets about men in the sun, naji al ali and the butterfly's burden. creators and inventors were raised in these villages and grew beards and brains from this soil's suffering. they were all strangers and heros to me and held me up as well as any Sufi prose. especially under tarzan's spell, folklore replaces reality and the hill is where i got engaged to a mosquito!

yukon gold seeping in through the blinds
projects sunlight lines on the pillow & you sang,

"i wanted to make it...
i got that from waiting here.
tran tran a la la,"

"ta ta
tip top tap, my dear.
we've seen how strong winds blow,
but i've had you all this time."

future flash forward to a time machine
and we'll go back to the city of apples, or those orange groves by the sea.

mayday started at the haymarket fair on the west side of chicago. & now 125 years later, it's still a wildly important and beautiful place, at least to us anyway. it was there that i found yemen, afghanistan, peru and so much that felt like summer rain. i walked around the park block dozens of times just surrounded & left only after i felt read. thanks kaki king for your ambient notes and legs today, they made me so tall. lessons learned: there's a lesson to learn. when in rome, say "come nostalgico!" DISSOLVING IS THE NEW WEAK KNEES, people!

on april 28.2011, i wrote: elephant tusks were about to emerge from his face, i swear it was that much of a moment.


who was that about?!

april showers dance lightly and carry a lot of grace. that equation is more than my heritage, it's my soul song.

for philistines, the past that remains is found within a future that can't exist. this sentence is the salt of my sea. it weighs me down and helps me float.

in another life, this siren would have spent days in idyllic laughter with sea salted caramel skin under a mediterranean sun...& that's what she thinks of as her body lies restlessly floating on driftwood in the dead sea. nearing the jordanian shore, she crashes into a pile of wrecked ships and a titan's memories, "is this where they find sleep bound relief?"... the question echoes in her head and imprints her back as she falls into a heap of a human atop the dark planks. like a lullaby, the wonder cradles her young body into a purpose-driven dream about a listless city and for the first time yet on this maritime escape, she slept.

rise rise rise. someday lambs will become lions and we will all hafta grow up. but not yet. right now, there is just so much to say about living in a book and dreaming of a paperhouse and a picket line.

they say if your lover is a bull, wear red. i wore a red dress & worried about two things exactly.
1. subtle body, dream body, it would be the worst if you left with my soul before my mindless body.
2. some stranger is my spirit double and has both the care and callous to walk around with my memories. (if the myth is a man, i'd hope he at least has my coral cheeks...)

asking important questions came later. first, my autumn car took me out to play saturday games. i was an hour behind spring bodies & even still learned that paper frogs are meant to be shared over coffee for a citybrother, a street friend and laughing goatee. though it wasn't the first time a fisherman was a medicine man's messenger and the siege a prognosis, it was the closest to home. it taught me to stay away from the sea & that river stones keep you safe. in moments like this origami is therapy & cigarettes necessary. life has legs and it's running. so here's to the happiness that comes when the ant eats the snake & all the folkloric love of luck that comes with that image. tutto a posto.

in everyplace, having gotten used to the wind, i'd close my eyes, not so i could sleep, but so that i could see. this is how i traveled to you in dreams worth more than most porches generations sat on & spilled sweet tea on. i thought about your conception of little creatures and how monsters came to be in the dark, "it was from thirst and hunger that their names and faces changed." in the peak of night and the pit of hope, you fed them and gave them water to drink like the clothes off your back. too shy to look me in the eye, you said to me in the same visceral way you would to anyone, " this is how i found you and myself."

the roots, like most visionaries, can start at fela kuti and end up somewhere like : we knew from the start that things fall apart. i really l o v e them.

a little morning lullaby is a hollow reminder full of tunisia. nuh-nee. nuh-neee. sleep has come to you. your mother is a moon and your father is a star. nuh-nee. nuh-neee.

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.