one thing i've learned is that if i swear loudly while sprinting to the shower, it actually makes me move faster. it is like shouting when you kick something, breathing out in little tssts that accompany and so magnify each punch. i am clamoring with a violent lateness through the early morning and my roommate says, "did you hear our neighbors working on their stomp rendition until 4am?"

did i, jesus. my actual reply is something more along the lines of "fuckity fuck fuck." the period is the bathroom door slamming. i've overslept by about a million miles.

ten minutes later i'm at the bus stop. my hair is flopped heavy like soggy jungle vines but clean. i dont know what the neighbors were doing, but in my half-dream state i understood it as a fugue. they were playing a fugue for the apocalypse on the apartment complex as though it was some tremendous multiple-percussion set up. when the deadbolt came undone and and somebody walked into the kitchen, i resigned myself to the fact that they'd come to kill me. and then i realized that people dont often make toast prior to partaking in a giant fugal butchery. and now! a coda by toast! to-a-to-a-to-to-ast! the small ding saved my life. like a lighthouse on the shores of consciousness.

i want to ask them what they were on, man. but, hell.

the problem with being in a relationship with your work is that you can't have much of a dialogue. i can't say to my work, "yo, work! i need you to say something kind to me every now and again." then my work tells me i'm pretty at least once a day so's we're assured to cuddle up real sweet and wake up real gentle.

it is just a series of observed successes and failures that have nothing to do with how you actually live your life.

i want to curl up in my bed and translate beowulf from old english to contemporary english and then back to middle. sounds like heaven.

and a photograph.

note to self:
frozen spinach is not such a bad comfort food.

i hate reading poems about buses, seeing plays about buses, being prompted to examine myself as if i am a bus. who are the different people in your bus? who is driving this bus? this is the bus of you.

but fuck if i haven't been harping on them, lately. these little pods of people. they're especially compelling before the sun has completely risen. fucking huge fireflies that open their misted abdomen to you like some sacred mother machine.

last night i was riding the bus home and the driver and i were the only people in the universe. it was so cold you could smell fingerprints on the windows. the driver was a talking loudly talking man. i sat on a cold plastic seat at the far end and didnt say a damn thing and he kept on talking loudly talking. he told me at great volume about how his friend charlie had a bus, this bus his friend charlie had, a 30 footer, that charlie, he'd furnished it and he was selling it, his friend charlie was, it was a nice bus, a 30 footer, that charlie had.

if you stare at fingerprints long enough, pictures show up like on a cottage cheese ceiling.

"80 grand, though, i dont got that." he bellowed like train stack. "but i dont want to buy a house, neither."

his voice was a large flapping bird shooting from the windshield at which he was shouting down the tunnel of the bus. it then bounced off the back and scatted into a thousand simultaneous and disoriented trajectories, in the same way that the lights of passing cars would refract and flicker through the windows and the fingerprints in a thousand simultaneous, disorienting geometries. his friend charlie had a bus.

this morning at the bus stop a drunk transient was trying to help a chinese girl on exchange figure out the schedule. it was proving to be more difficult than he had anticipated. the glowing mother machine arrived and she and i both got on. from the ground he made me promise to look after her. one of his eyes didnt open all the way. i promised. the doors flapped closed. we were back in the womb.

she and i never made eye contact.

he was on another bus this afternoon and lost track of his leg compared to the exit door. and then he realized it wasn't the right stop anyway.

mardi therefore gras, bitches.