ad.venture

i may not feel ready but i get out of bed and fire up my engine with some coffee and water. it's friday. i don't know what will happen but i love an adventure. i'm gonna take it moment by moment. bring it on!

broke the dial on the contrast

i once got more into socializing than books
the writing and reading
when you go blind like that there’s no sure thing
you gonna come back


i spun around that way for years
comparison shopping
broke the dial on the contrast


now i got my vision back you
can be damn sure i’m deep
into paper


you need no contrast to believe
in yourself

Trouble'99 (excerpt wip)

Everyone but Aden thought little about the future and investing in it, and even he was beginning to get derailed. I was protective and discouraged him from going out with us, stay and do your studies. Sometimes I stayed back with him and we went to the library or a coffeehouse to work. These were special moments for us. Fetching machine made coffee late into the night, talking about medicine and the life of a surgeon, cutting people up, dreaming about our great future. When he got into a zone, I dismissed myself and took a detour over to the fiction section to find something by Burgess or Borges or Burrows or Bukowski. I thought, if god or the head librarian told me the funding was cut off for fiction and made me choose one letter of the alphabet which we could keep, sorted by authors last names, I would likely select B. Then I would jump off the Navy Pier wishing I might drown.

tireless

thank god for this

winter morning
counteracted by effort and
shower and coffee

i cut and paint my nails
the tigers alongside the
furnace

i scrub the pots and pans
the tea kettle

today may i be
tireless

with words
with efforts and
devotion

b

unlike who you
are and what
you do

you cannot trust what
you think what
you feel

to be real

0202.2020

you wanna tell a story of what really happened but you cannot because your memory clouds it and your feelings about it colors it and your thoughts about it change it from what it really was to what you guess it was, and that's all right... just don't go thinking you can or pretending that's the real truth because it's not. it cannot be and it's not. no one has the real truth not even the facts. the facts are closer than you or me, but the facts alone are meaningless. that's why it's fun to write fiction.

february

the first day of february and the ground not as stiff as my spine. felt more like spring and i refused to accept it (on the grounds of my fear of global warning). i forced myself indoors the whole day. it was saturday so i had to go out for the obligatory errands, and stopped in at my friend the chiropractor. she asked me a couple of vague questions and demanded i use real ice in a ziploc not peas. eat the peas! she said, eat the peas! that was about the only inspired declaration i ever heard from her. doctors don't go to med school to become life coaches. though she pounced on my legs, my back was winter and would not make a sound. my neck was springy and cracked loud and easy. i am reminded we are made of bones not just muscle and heart and soul.