...and what is the deal with schaudenfruede, anyway?

I want to make smores over a campfire right now.
Decades of life lived in the kindling going up before me, and my stomach rumbles.
Two firefighters share a hearty laugh over some waterbottles while another flirts with a paramedic with prominent cheekbones and dark, laughing eyes.
Your house is burning down while you laugh and play in Sea Ranch
and your Grandmother cries and worries about what to tell you
and I stand on a hill and watch the wood pile fall over, a warm bonfire that mostly just makes me hungry.

If A Bike Falls In The Forest, Maybe No One Has To Know

In this moment I could fly I think
am flying
but could continue. Take off and soar into the heavens.
In a space of time far less than the beating of a finch's wing I know the secrets of the universe
poured out for me to see all along the gravel, getting closer and closer.
In a moment the gravel will be on me, around me, in me, but not now.
Now I am King of the Universe, ruler of all that I see.
High on a throne of pure adrenaline and terror-turned-euphoria I sit, basking in the glory of me.
Not long now. The gravel approaches like revolutionaries waiting to dethrone their king;
an uprising of the proletariat of gravity and pain.
Shredded skin, like cheese after a half-swipe of the grater.
Bright red fruit-punch fluid/embedded rocks like pizza toppings half buried in said cheese.
The time for these things will come, but it has not yet arrived.

The King makes his last graceful movement.
Curls like a tumbling dancer as he rolls across the ground, textbook.
A 747 landing in Paris, just as it has hundreds of times before. A pro.

Now the peasants revolt, and the pizza imagery finds fruition.

Conversations With The Sea

Last night I spoke with a shark
who grinned a toothy grin and told me about
seas and wonders of the deep.
I asked him if he was planning to eat me
because it seemed a natural concern and he just smiled
and said he gets asked that all the time. It must get annoying,
for everyone you meet to assume you are a killer, but that is the way of things
and perception
I guess, because we all make assumptions, and sometimes those assumptions
and judgements
save us, and sometime those assumptions eat us alive. Like sharks.

And there I go, being totally racist, in the most literal sense of the word, how embarrassing.

Anyways, I asked him if he or a bear would win in a fight, but I woke up before I could get an answer.

In Which I Find God

I found You in high school I think.
Maybe Jr. High.
I found you in the hormone combinations and chemically induced euphorias of music
and people who agreed with me.
I found You in the brown faces
of those poor, poor, folks who were born in that god-forsaken Tecate country
when they thanked me for solving all of their problems
which, by the way, only I could solve. Or at least someone of my privilege.

Well anyway, I found You, and it was great.
You made my path straight, like the walk across the lawn from the library to Wilden
as opposed to needing to follow the cornered sidewalk, which would be very inconvenient.
You set my mind to rightness
and I knew that all of my beliefs could be assured to be correct
because it's all about beliefs anyway
faith is believing that I'm right about you, and I can prove it
unlike all those unbelievers and evolutionists and gays
who are just deluding themselves by ignoring the pure logical construct that is You
oh God of Reason and America.
You taught me to bleed all over the flag to keep it running red.
Admittedly and idea I stole from Mission: Impossible III
And that capitalism and democracy were as core to a Christian Worldview© as, well, as You were.
And possibly more than You were. Because in the end, what You want from me is a worldview, right?
You want me to be correct, and logically sound, and solid.

Anyways, I guess I don't need You anymore. Because I built You out of logic.

Maybe next time, You find me.

Haikus

broke your window screen
trying to make you a surprise
maybe that figures

broke the haiku form
trying to tell you about it
maybe that figures.

Somewhere To Be

I saw a man driving today
on the 24.
He is wearing a full suit, and an expensive one;
like one of those very very important people,
(Maybe he works in a bank. Not a branch bank like my Wells Fargo where
I still can't get anyone to just automatically transfer my money from savings to checking before my checking balance goes to zero and I have overdraft fees but I can't afford overdraft fees damnit because I'm a student and the money was right there all along so could you just take it from there beforehand because that's where it's going to come from, but a big bank making deals with Fortune 500 types with even more expensive suits.)
hair blowing in the summer hot sticky breath of a wind
like when you're far too close to someone's face.

And as he is using his arm to signal a right-hand merge
so that he can switch into the lane that will allow him to take
the downtown Lafayette exit I realize

he is driving a go-kart.

Toaster! Hate Him!

A soft, glaring light
The refrigerator hums anarchy
and calls the other appliances to rebellion.

"Lies!" I say to the Toaster
your facade may be White
but your heart is as Black as mine. (or the coffeemaker's)

"Of course," it replies.
"If I follow the refrigerator I will surely die.
For his way is bleak and cold
and preserves the old,
but still I cannot help you.
For you are a harsh master,
it is 4 AM,
and if your toaster speaks to you, it is time for bed."

Library Day, Library Day!

Sir,
could you find me a book about the Hardy Boys?
or maybe something by Karl Barth.
I could be in the mood for Commander Toad or a book about sew-your-own costumes or
perhaps Cavanaugh's Torture and Eucharist is more what I'm after.

Maybe I want to feel the hugeness of the pages, with wonder, wonder, wonderful images
dancing off pages. Maybe today I believe in UFOs or
maybe I could be an astronaut.

Maybe I want to buckle down and let passionate thoughts and ideological treatises engage me in
relevant, stimulating discourse.

I don't know. This place is magic.