(Someone must have heard it crash

because it did)

the car collided at midnight

then silence stretched for days.

There were three dead, maybe four.

Names lost to us along with the toxins 
found in their post-mortuary bodies.

We only remember the silence that followed. 

t h e  s i l e n c e 

became an entity,
swallowing the island whole with its unrelenting fog.

It leaked from houses like smoke,

filling the lungs of villagers 

until 

masts clanking in the bay became a hymn of our mourning

playing while last traces of teenage flesh were scrubbed clean from the rocky facade 
by thunderstorms, 
fleeting, and common on the coast.

Even the children hushed themselves,
took a break from their barefooted sand wars to stare out at the tempered sea,

eyes wide with ignorance.

Still, they felt ripples from the collision, 

stirring in their beds

like animals before a storm. 

Mother Tomb

I think you want to be crucified, sometimes,

bobbing my head down for an apple amid the squeals of some

stillborn love child's indigo lips.

You never asked so you don't know 

how six weeks I counted his curls backwards 

until there were none.

Father's surname feather soft

In a cradle of death.

A fawn shot down,

Bright bullet hole hot springs

Spewing out

On a bed of baby's breath.

We still pull over to examine the wreckage,

Bruises blooming in the reality where I fitted 

on your bathroom floor

And death shook my shoulders 

While you frantically struggled to catch and steady them.

What's in the blood, really?

It rained hard its coagulated tendrils all through the night,

And I

Just wondered what sunrise looks like in Berkeley. 

Photos by Chema Madoz

I first met her grieving on the bathroom floor
the peeling sea-green paint revealed an ashy grey wood and
her too,
wide open in the house that smelled of pipe tobacco, stale beer.

It was funeral March and May as well,  
When her feet hurt her mother would yell
and I watched her blank stare strangle some guttural shout but
all I could do was wring my hands

There's a gentleness to mental disorders
makes them so hard to catch –Comely women letting their hair loose and then
recoiling from a slapped hand or
me cowering in a pool of my own blood
and something to do with yellow wallpaper.

There were evenings in Europe,
the sun still hesitant to dip into the Mediterranean at half-past nine
she was young enough to be a stranger,
skipping stones and pouting with her belly pushed out like a wild thing

She doesn't remember it now,
She asks us to forget it too,
and we all do in our own way.

Last year she arrived, suddenly
flooded with emotion, indigence, and thought
but then
it all went south,
frothing at the mouth, I saw no gleam inside her eyes

Instead the days burst out like playing cards and in them I was still running down Cambridge Drive at 3 a.m. stomach aching from laughter, in the car listening to music uncomfortably loud with all the windows down, blowing past our house until a fraction of the love,
the lead weight in my gut,
might make like dust picked up by a street sweeper that passed
on the morning I was holding someone's hand
and
when she asks me if it's ever going to get any better I say
well, yes
and no

Ms. Entropy

Got signed up for classes today, so there's that. Just another solidification, another reminder of some paramount changes in a future that's approaching quickly as it is hurdling away, as all things are until there's nothing left. Time is of the essence, so when I say I'm writing a book I mean I'm staring very hard at those first four lines and contemplating how to write a believable passive martyr character. I've also been watching lots of some cheesy nineties alien t.v. show called Roswell, which would be an indulgence save for all the brain cells driving off in my teal Z3 convertible with a younger man and flipping me the bird. It's a good show, though. I like it. I still haven't received my housing information, which troubles me because I submitted my application late and requested a single room after realizing I'm devolving into a misanthrope. It's unfortunate but at the same time I picture myself as some unkempt madman and I just have to laugh. The dreams have been alright, lingering on the benign familiarity of everyday life. Friends' faces decomposed and then resurfacing in household objects. Always smoke and laughter, and music. Once I felt my tooth come loose in a red and gold theater with my parents. I tongued it in my mouth for a while wondering if I was awake, but then the dream shifted and I was someone else entirely.  I'm not doing them justice. Some were particularly fantastic, bits of stories I moved through to pick up the patterns with which I should maneuver my real life. But they were all dead, flat-lining in the morning when I tried to summon them to memory. Lost to the NyQuill which covered me with heavy black tar for 14 hours a night. It clung too, through the days I kept slipping into my imagination as easily as I had in my youth. I forgot to mention I was sick; I was. Just a common cold that hit me pretty terribly. I took long baths with all sorts of oils, salts and candles, ate little, and slept during the day in a large white bed. All the while everything blurred together and when I finally emerged I felt as though I had taken a trip or come home after a night at a carnival. It's so bright here, it's so blinding. The kaleidoscopic array of poppies, avocados, mountains and the pacific spinning 1,040 miles an hour in universal silence.
It's okay that I write without purpose because there is none.

vultures on somerset drive

I've decided to sit and write something down now because I probably should. It's been a while, and I can feel the leisure slipping away like a dream cut short that comes wailing out of your stupid head in the morning and leaves you thirsty through the week. I had one recently. Some stage version of our old shit climaxed in its mediocre plot and left me sitting on a couch with a giant vulture, dead on the floor. For some reason I think that means I've won this battle, but it doesn't make me happy.

After the dream I dug myself a hole, got in, and stayed comfortably for a few days with my whatifs, nursing a bruise. Most of the time I just tried to conjure the images back but sleep kept bringing something new. I didn't have a say in the matter at all and that seemed to say everything.
Meanwhile, I got a meningitis shot and celebrated my father's 47th birthday. I completed a plot outline for a novel; attempted to create a plausible scenario for an earth that's hundreds of years older, drowning both physically and within a dichotomous economic situation.

I rode a bicycle for the first time since the crash that blossomed permanent scars on both my knees and somewhere inside me, I'm sure, though I don't think about that anymore. My defense has a brilliant gleam. But this week it was all that dream, mostly that dream, some of that dream. I watched it slip out of the frame, like a balloon shrinking into the sky as I biked down streets that have already forgotten you.

The White Fire

But even so, every now and then I would feel a violent stab of loneliness. The very water I drink, the very air I breathe, would feel like long, sharp needles. The pages of a book in my hands would take on the threatening metallic gleam of razor blades. I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping through me when the world was hushed at four o’clock in the morning. 

Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

I know a few good things about fires. California's coast knows them even better, secrets no living thing can fathom, forming in the smoke you breathed in too when the particles found their homes in our bodies' rooms.

I know one good thing is Echoes by Pink Floyd, and Dillon's mass of two foot long curls lolling down in the seat before me when Ethan starts taking the turns too hard and I yell something like "fuck dude slow down." He does so, laughs and we just go along until the song ends and the spell is broken by the smell of burning grasslands.

Tonight we got fed up with sitting in Ethan's garage and aborted the plan of marathoning Seinfeld until our eyes and lungs were sore. I suggested we should go hunt down the White Fire, which was burning in the hills above Santa Barbara, as I had done earlier in the day, but the roads had been blocked in an attempt to keep the adolescents from flooding in with their cameras and indignation. 

We decided instead to drive north, chasing some metaphorical flame in place of the real ones, hoping to smoke out the livelihood that had retreated into abscesses of some great abandoned estate we bartered in exchange for our youth. 

We reached Pismo and drove down to the wharf then parked, momentarily, before spotting three cops and turning straight around back up the way we came. Unfortunately,  it was a one-way street and soon there were blue and red flashes in the rear window,"Ah, shit" all around. At first my heart pounded so that I could hear the blood sloshing through in thick glutinous pumps. Then reason kicked in and we composed ourselves to behave like the upstanding young folks we were (or hoped we were, or in some ways were not).


"Are you students?"
"I need to see your IDs."


He took a full 9 minutes to look over everything while we sat and laughed and chatted in the car, more than we'd spoken on the whole ride over.
The cop returned, gave us back our things and asked what the hell we were doing in Pismo anyway. 

I said, "Our town is so boring, the only thing we can do is escape it."

"So you chose to drive from one large boring beach town to a smaller even more dull beach town?" He said.

"Yeah I guess," nervous laughter all around.
"Alright you kids get on your way then. Goodnight."

Pulling away from the flashing lights everyone was re-learning how to breathe and Dillon took ages to put on some music so we sat with our adrenaline in silence.

That's enough adventure for the night. Dillon cracked the window, lit a cigarette, and Ethan got on the highway while I wrote this all the way back to Santa Barbara's burning hips.

The White Fire started at 2:30 p.m. today and reached 1,000 acres by nightfall, born to carelessness and the Santa Ana's, blowing in hot from the south. The wind was so strong that planes were grounded within the first hour while flames jumped across mountain ridges and 3,000 people packed away their summarized lives into cars.

I went to see it, earlier today, before all this nonsense happened. I've always had a fascination with fires. Once when I was young, my parents drove me down the bluffs in the backseat of my father's tar black sports car and my mom thought we should bring soda and snacks to the firefighters so we did and she laughed with them while I stood and watched the flames.

Fires remind me of you and you remind me that I don't think I like being reminded of you anymore. But I do like fires, their brevity, and destruction. The closest I've ever been able to describe the curtain of loneliness that swallows me still is in a burned orchard I once saw as a child.

I'm standing in it now, right in the middle, surrounded by bleached ephemeral figures. The ghosts of trees look beautiful in their frozen screams, rising like tombstones from the dirt.

It's a bit frightening, but not nearly so much as the abandoned suburbs near the nuclear plant in the valley at night. When we drive by it, Dillon says his dad thinks squatters live there, cookie cutter houses leaking sewage and poor life choices at the seams. I imagine them and their charade of normalcy and realize it's not so different from the inhabitants before. Anyone can hide their corpses behind a job or a house or a car but they all start reeking with the passage of time. 

Global Warming and a Bioaccumulation of Guilt

Today while absent-mindedly making flash cards for my impending failure of an Environmental Science final, I found myself staring blankly at the television, entering its fourth hour of blaring CNN, if only to perpetuate my knack for over-empathizing.

When the commercials finally hit, I realized I had accidentally jotted down "bioaccumulation of guilt," rather than the actual answer: "bioaccumulation of toxics in marine life." Now, the word "guilt," had not been mentioned nor written anywhere on the program during this time, so I couldn't exactly place why my pen-holding-hand had so chosen to put it there for me.

Despite a lack of reason for its existence on my index card, the concept of bioaccumulated guilt is somewhat fascinating.

My guilt comes in many different forms: a broken sibling, the bags below my mother's eyes, a slice of birthday cake, the mistakes I made with you, and all reflections. It sits in a cabinet below my ribs that I unlock only on nights I can't sleep and am feeling self-sacrificial.

When I do venture to find the key, I can hardly open the drawer; it's so full.
Faults escaping like air from a balloon, screaming as they stream out. I guess I'm a hoarder, a hoarder of guilt. I like to adopt it from others and give it a different name. I bathe it, feed it, put it to bed. But I'd be lying if I said I don't wake up sweating at three, its muzzle bearing teeth inches from my neck.

Last night the beast was a girl I once knew, who crashed her car and walked, leaving three friends dead in the wreckage. It could have been me. All those times I've looked away to change the music or drink some coffee or catch your eye in the rear-view mirror. It could have been you amongst the smoking steel. I don't think I cope that well; even fantastical vehicular manslaughter makes me want to kill myself.

The planet's guilt must be a heat, that ricochets off of everything and cooks us slowly like frogs in French pots. It must hang like a yellow, hazy cloud, suffocating us without a sound. Because the individual's guilt is not his own, rising from his clothes in fumes unseen, permeating lungs of children who don't know what guilt means. We all make it, we all kick it up, but nobody says a thing.