Diving Bell

Listening to Smokey & Miho - Ocean in your Eyes

We make acquaintances, exchange pleasantries, get lost in a slipstream city, burning down the wind like a phoenix on the breeze. We know, of course, that these are the most temporary connections of all, tenuous fingers gripping fingers. And yet, if we ever lapsed in these conventions, we would shrivel into dusty gouls. It is the very fluid of our veins.

Listening to Eels - Bride of Theme from Blinking Lights

Everything is gated here; framed by cords or hoses. They crown each entrance and exit with a subtle dignity. We walk like indentured princes, holding our heads in the knowledge that we own nothing, but feeling our birthright coursing in our veins and knowing: we were born to be kings.

Listening to Tegan & Sara - Living Room / Terrible Storm

Interim, between unknowns. I can't tell what we were doing and sure no clue where we are headed. Like Tom Joad we put one foot in front of the other. But for now, we wait.

The refinery dominates much of my consciousness. It informs even the things that I write; as translated, of course, through the lens of the literature that I read. I don't subscribe to the school of thought that claims we cannot experience the "poetic feeling" without a form to interpret it through, but I do think it's the form that makes the "poetic feeling" legible. I finished Sinclair Ross' As For Me and My House in all its glorious bleakness and this informs my writing. I have been motoring through Stienbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (see what I did there) and you should know that his apocalyptic, rambling style is unavoidably infectious. And this city, this air, these people, this rich earth, those pregnant glances, the stench of shit, the trembling and tenbreous, the beating of a vengeful sun, the goading and grating, these deep mornings, a hand clenched in a pocket, wind, and you most of all. Each one of you. You invade me and change me more than you know. But I intend to let you know.

Will

Ghosts and Living Things

It's a new home under the same old sun. There might be ghosts under these floorboards, in this space where I too reside. The trees are empty of any new life as though time and season have no meaning here. The sky is bigger, as if declaring its own importance; and to us it is (important). We can't avoid this place changing us, but the change I want is under the surface, beneath the floorboards, the roots of the tree, and the rich black earth under the sun-baked crust. It's a new heart under the same old skin.