tuesday gets roughed up

the bed is pages and pages
and red pens
and cups of coffee

it is too hot for coffee
but it is too slow
to think without it

the cat likes to walk on the pages
(that come easily
sometimes
without thought
but other times
like wisdom teeth
cracked and pulled
from their comfortable places
in my jaw)
in some way
his paws give life to the words
and if he disapproves
he lets me know
by licking them
until they blur.

The only way I have of explaining is by absorbing everything around me- the sound the fan makes during it's relentless oscillations (maybe it wants to be set free. or at least turned off)
the jacaranda trees the come to life unexpectedly and put me to peaceful happy sleep with their scent, the simple, edged rhythms of every song I've heard today, and the desire to put it all together in one single, understandable cluster of words. So here it is:

it is easy to love the sound a guitar makes
but
difficult to explain why
it makes the sound it does.
Is that my job?

the same moon as rostand

in a used-book store in san diego:

a tattered old copy of cyrano de bergerac
some pages gone completely
but the important ones
there
(aren't they all important?)
and i read it
and read it
and read it
and spoke through the rhymes
like a spinning wheel
on an airplane landed upside down

and i promise
i'll speak only in verse
and put twelve syllables in every line i write
and you'll fall asleep to the sound of my voice
under the same moon as rostand

books

from a used bookstore in Eau Claire:

san francisco mime troupe: the first ten years
footlights on the prairie: repertory theatre in the rural united states, 1900-1950

i want to go back for:
my life in the russian theatre
a history of the federal theatre project
an early biography of bert williams

apparently, someone had collected all of these relatively rare theatre books as they were being discarded (discarded!) from state universities. somehow, they ended up at this bookstore. and then i ended up there, looking for something completely different. there were many others, too many to list and too many to take home in my suitcase.

discarded
i only read books
that have already been read
no strangers to
hands and eyes
bent pages
and scribbled margin notes
sideways and upside down
we are all
discarded books
shelves and shelves within us
dirty thumbs and broken spines
organized in our own ways
subjects printed by hand
on white slips of paper
stuck between
vonnegut
and
alexie
to seperate
stories
from
poetry

but you still have to look
because the book
that you need
that you've been needing
for all of your life
is already there-
not under the right subject
and not legible
and sometimes not in english
between
a volume of the bronte sisters
and a misplaced collection
of r. crumb
a bedroom of pages
like skin
inked with letters
spilling the secrets of
the ground beneath our feet.