Telling Stories

There is fiction in the space between
the lines on your page of memories

There's a convection, hot and cold, forgetting and knowing: it carries little true and false things up and under again. A surface, pocked with doubts and diving questions, watery surface of a story. Why does it always come back to water? He remembered stories of cloning and stolen nuclear material, told in a lab, and him as an eight year-old paranoid of someone suctioning off his DNA and injecting the stolen chromosomes through the membranes of some foreign egg, him being uncompressed and reconstituted as a frog or some other misformed hellishness. Not that he was to be put off from science: conversation turned comfortingly soon to hyperdrive, artificial intelligence, the measurements and prospects of bones.

Lost in a churn of slides - Can Animals Think? Pannonian Shoreline: 12 MA, arrows weaving to and from Africa - and clay models, scaly questions, a boy floating somehow towards a distant want, islanded just off-path of a mean current that plucks and tows and tosses out to sea. Where is he?

Soaked cardboard boxes with inscrutable labels in black marker, letters two inches high drift by like brown kelp. A flock of tickets, practically a book's worth, to nowhere he's heard of slide by on the warm wavering surface of the water. Brown wrinkled lillies bob by like toy boats. He wonders about long and deepmawed fish or sea snakes. Where he is is insensible, dark and oceanic beneath his neckline, only the theoretical land of those tickets to remind him - where did they go?

Some years later and only after learning to live off the odd flotsam and when to trust and distrust the whims of waves and flows, he washes up on a bed of sand, sleeps on top of where the sun has laid down on the silica grains, gets up with them sticking to his back.

A yelping dog is waiting for him, it runs back and forth from him to some indiscrete whiteness laid on the sand. The body of a fish, same as he worried about in the drift earlier, gapes blind through milky eyes. The dog has not touched it and wags its tail as it watches the boy watch it. He reaches out to feel the dried fish, breathless afraid that it might snap at his hand, and finds its deceptively dull skin still damp and slick, and its gills twitch and flutter. Terrifies the dog, which bolts and then runs back, wagging, and bolts again. The boy follows, finds himself at the edge of a water hole, black and thick as the sea and with creepers draped into it and swirling into its depths.

Falls asleep there, the dog in his arms, warmer than the night air, and awakes wet and gasping, canine nowhere in sight, island inconceivably absent, just a dream?

There is fiction in the space between
You and me

Potential Difference

Grainy shades of wanting, quantified
sloping pain tracked by a needle
knowing the empty pull of
copper veins, stretched staring
for bare electric motes in chorale
straining over the break
in parallel - blind buzzed and piled
one on the other - and air strengthless
between, carrying nothing, stretch
over the needle, there, how much?

Empty potential, stored cold battery
high and untouched tight wire humming
nothing, but over the break, invisibly
the reach of far-blind dizzy flakes
scatters in my blood, (the needle
shows it), finds the graded span
between that flush far-afield
snowdrift-lonely huddle,
and the surge
home.


It's been so very long since I wrote a poem about physics. This one explains the idea of voltage in clear words we can all relate to. Ah, electrical potential difference, you make my heart beat and always will, what with the sinoatrial node and such. Been a long time since I've written any kind of poem, though. That's the downside of knowing of, and in some lucky cases just plain knowing, so many better poets, it can quiet you down a lot. I can always shrug it off on account of stories being more my thing. I finished a new one. It's probably too big to put up here, I'm workshopping it and then probably trimming it down. I'll cut it from 12 pages to a paragraph and then post the key sentence stand-alone, like an verbal extreme closeup.

For Anyone I Missed

Those of you without email addresses properly stored on my contacts list take this:



Basically, if it sounds like fun to you, you should come.

Be râh mioftam

Any of you who speak Farsi totally understood that. It means I'm hitting the road (literally, even - it's cool how English and Farsi have so many figures of speech in common). Of course, Farsi has nothing to do with any of this, except that the final exam for the course made me delay my departure for Italy.

But depart I will, now that I'm done with school. Done for the next three weeks, anyway.

Huh. That seems to be all I had to say. Carry on. See y'all soon, I hope.

Numb as a Statue

't'ain't nothin' special
when the present meets the past.
I'm always takin' care of business,
I've paid my first and last.

I'd dearly like to uproot this insomnia. This latest round has been nice enough to leave me, inconsecutively, ten hours of sleep in the last seventy-two. That is, about five hours total on Friday and Saturday nights, and last night, none. I've been known to say I had "no sleep last night," meaning a minimal amount. This time, though, my brain did not for one minute flip to an asleep state. I gave up at 6 a.m. It was already bright out. Somehow the fact that the world was beautiful regardless was a consolation.

I've just come dripping from the shower. I feel like I might pass out, gratifyingly, from exhaustion. I do not believe this will come to pass. I'm still too busy thinking.

It's an endless rivulet singing through my head that keeps me awake while I contemplate the backs of my eyelids and the conscious acts of breathing. I'm reeling through an enormity of things I'd wish to fix about myself. The inability to shut up and go to sleep, for one. Quietnesses, loudnesses, things too vague to explain or too specific to mention. Things I didn't do or shouldn't have. It's not unlike me - in fact it's happened much more than once - to walk too far after turning down a ride, to make things difficult, walking away from what was waiting for me, for no reason other than to wander longer and worse. I would - have often, come to think about it - more probably press into blank forest than follow a path laid before me in untrodden leaves wanting wear, as the man said. I must want wear too.

To put it shortly (as if I haven't blown that chance already,) the kinds of things everyone stays awake thinking, sometimes.

Actually I want either to drop where I stand or wake up. Or really, both.

I want to count back down from my enormous number to zero and lose those superfluous things, find the truth of the basic state, close my eyes, exhale indefinitely and glide un-knowing through scattering secrets.

Does any of this mean a goddamn thing?

I don't care if it's superficial,
You don't have to dig down deep.
Just bring enough for the ritual.
Get here before I fall asleep.