is a passenger

jacob | san francisco, ca | sometimes i write things down

[kdecember30-deactivated20201130]

(building a case, mid-forest)

Starlet of something in mind, slow voltage

Of a campfire portal

And you? I will prove it to you.

Watch how I build our case.

I run the show by not running the show.

Once I walked across Lake Michigan

Is the first famous teenager to leave the lake

Palace of I can still hear you say

Palace of  When I think of heaven

Deliver me in a black-winged bird

I just read a tweet that someone

Unhooked her bra and was able to

Take it off, put it in her purse

Without removing her coat 

or sweater.

For once in my life I’d like to open a door

And Into The Mystic will automatically play

Also I sleep with my bra on, so we’re

Complete Opposites.

Didn’t realize we had died is the premise

That all forests have been built on

I once found a 1950’s baseball card

In the deep of the wall.

Don’t ever let the next question you ask be what was it worth.

Just kidding,

God ask me anything.

[isapassenger]

when the words stopped coming

no one can quite remember when they started leaving. it’s hard to talk about now. all those syllables we couldn’t hold onto.

the first glass of salt water goes down like december in california. head breaking above the glass chasm, twisted lines on the shore at 2 am. by the seventh it starts to feel maybe natural. surely we’d done something; penance comes only when you deserve it; they told us with hands on sunday morning.

it worked best if you took it straight from an estuary, even better at the equinox. after a liter we could take back whole sentences. in these latter years there are only a few words i bother to chase after.

a mason jar filled at alamere let’s me look you in the eye & whisper ‘lavender’ — early spring, the fractal beginnings between us repeating on interminably. ‘eliding’ in the deep blue of night, blending together in the years i knew you before we met. matching pitch with songbirds, cry ‘amber’ in the morning — hope you know i’ll always treasure these moments.

after so much silence, the sky broke & rain came again. you wandered out to the back porch, danced the stars down in the midst of it. & all at once —

our bodies pulsed with the original language. after the bite marks & bright red at the coastline, following you deeper into the pacific. we had no need for grammar, every tense blended, every affection in synchronous. you told me the most beautiful things are born of bad timing, changes in the weather, warm accidents.

[isapassenger]

february 2017

julia had always known how to split the day down the center. live out both sides at once. blurring in the bedroom with the windows open, all the hot press fever we can’t get enough of. each time we close our eyes & leave bite marks they open on the other side.

we’re counting fallen leaves from sequoia’s off highway 1. parked amid the tall grass, a dash out into childhood’s abandon. she caught my breath when the asthma attacked, let me come up slow, until the morning split through the slatted blinds of our unlawfully occupied apartment window. she said we’ll only lose a little time in the gaps between sentences, moments of the deepest blue-black that promise “tomorrow, again” in the transition.

now the fever won’t leave. i keep swallowing winters trying to drive it out, but julia’s pulled on a blazer, locking the front gate, globes of all our ethers falling beneath the campanile.

the sun is so bright we can only see a few feet ahead. listen in on eucalyptus. hear children laughing as the pacific kisses their legs. we lay out on blankets carried down from the cliffs in backpacks. exchange non-fiction that goes unread, i retell the stories of discovering california. for the first time, always & every morning. julia rests her head against my thighs, lifts her hands in lunar arcs to block the daylight.

“we’ll slip soon,” & then what of the magic in this life? there are no witnesses to the holy thunder of falling asleep, only to wake together on the other side.

[isapassenger]

january 2017

the district hadn’t burned yet, but high school boys had found the matches.

huddled in the back of class dividing shadows into uneven elements, we hadn’t even known

the doves could be killed in bethlehem. bison & sioux lain down both before & after the unholy wandering out west.

honeysuckle blighted in birmingham. letters from the jail recycled into newsprint, florida herself set fire to mims.

awake in separate bathtubs, i whisper prayer into tin can string memories; hope they’re untainted & you can still hear me.

as water comes down at the pacific gate thousands swimming toward the clock sure we could turn back

hours on the backyard myth we made as kids stained w/ wet grass & blooming july & loose t-shirts that just spell out ‘america.’

piled together on the train. no one had seen smoke, but we all heard it coming.

[kdecember30-deactivated20201130]

LITTLE RIVER

LR IS INTERESTED IN CREATIVE NON FICTION AND MEMOIR / PHOTO ESSAYS

Little River 7 is new & here! poems & art & sky by: 

Monet Patrice Thomas  / Ted Powers / Nate Pritts / John M Bellinger / Missy Dunaway / Jessie Lynn McMains / Juanita Rey / Catherine Moore / Alexander Buchanan / Ann Howells / Devon Miller-Duggan / Robert Foshag 

[isapassenger]

go read katherine’s lit mag full of days that hung low in the air & the longest minutes of 3 am

[exit152]

I Saw You Again Today

[isapassenger]

It is 2:37 a.m. and I make myself eat an apple while on the laptop, Alec Baldwin is hosting MatchGame, an experiment in the ageless art of game show hosting like orange light diving back into the ’70s. In an open tab, I am dropping nukes on New York City to watch the airburst swell into a new species of hydrogen fruit. I do this over and over until each bomb becomes a son that you detonate virtually into the night: Davy Crockett and Little Boy, Fat Man and Ivy Mike, Gadget, Castle Bravo and Tsar Bomba, all of the bombs are named for boys with fathers from Pakistan and Russia, sly America or the green seawaters of a Korean dream. Some of the really bad nukes only have numbers and are unnameable like B-83 because you can’t name something that can kill 1.8 million people even if you are its mother. You detonate the bomb and listen to “Gravity Rides Everything.” You detonate the bomb and still think the ’90s will save you. You tell your roommate that if the bomb goes off above 39th, you might both survive. New York City is the default target on nukemap.com. This is so unquestioned that you clutch your O’Hara and write David Trinidad in Chicago a handwritten letter to tell him about nuke anxiety. He doesn’t even know you well, but he was nice once in the lobby of the Marlton on 8th street when you recited Creeley and talked for three hours and lately you only want to be around people over sixty. You still expect them to save you. You still believe in elders. You can get the second season of MatchGame on abc.com for free. You can watch all your favorite comedians from 1992 come to life, resurrected like clay prophets, saying that you can live in the television where nothing will incinerate you. You are back in Seinfeld’s apartment and all that matters is that Jerry doesn’t want to date someone with man hands. All our futures are like time beating backwards into sitcoms with the laugh tracks of the dead and the apple in your mouth is now an organism you slew in your throat and each of your sons—Davey and Mike and Bravo and Fat Man—are standing on top of a heap of nuclear soil that was once a very specific girl, let’s call her Ana, and they are asking you to forgive them like any mother would.

Megan Fernandes, “Nukemap.com”

[endophoras-deactivated20200411]

christinasanantonio:

The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses on its turning. The weeks that come before are only a climb from balmy spring, and those that follow a drop to the chill of autumn, but the first week of August is motionless, and hot. It is curiously silent, too, with blank white dawns and glaring noons, and sunsets smeared with too much color.

–Natalie Babbitt, from Tuck Everlasting (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1975)

[isapassenger]

this is one of my favorite first lines.

[isapassenger]

lanterns over cape canaveral

this is the latest generation of our drive to the sea. chasing lightning between pines, their glaring bodies realized & dissolved again amidst the humidity & heat.

i wander past the windshield into last year, that annular yearning for the innermost circle, standing among the jagged spires of every backyard & highway exit in the florida that raised us.

thunderheads say our true names from the cape syllables like secrets, calling out ‘bright water’ & ‘july’ as the windows vibrate, & for a moment i resonate with cicada songs in the impossible deepness of night,

echoes of sarah crying out in each illumination & tremor. we tried to make a run for it when blue fled the summer, two miles to elementary school parking lot, at full speed we might just make it before the rain finds us

with our mouths splayed open toward pillars of sun that cut through the heaven they sold us. all that holy coalescing above our heads, sunday’s dichromes splashing on the pavement.

every myth carries with it the fear of sincerity. god called from the scene of a car accident, blinded by dandelion seeds in the shape of tomorrow, all memory at once — a shadow against the ocean.

[isapassenger]

every florida is a witness & apology

they circled the subdivisions so they never have to look out at the southern gothic scrub brush on chainlink fences, open fields where grass & pines have yet to be human-formed & taught the english language. instead all glances round toward the drain, the empty parking lot, the PTA meeting

near The Willows & Woodbridge St. every defense erected against the people we're afraid we actually might be turning taps & checking the water for sediment hollering at the sky to control the weather

vestiges of last season’s harvest sit along the roadside the origin story & our first house, refinished but perfectly recognizable where sarah skinned her knees & training wheels gave out where i lost a fight with god with 2001 with isaac with asthma

poison ivy threatening to cut through the veil, from here to the sinski's before they lost the property to a synthetic debt obligation we simulated ant colonies on the garage computer, built from parts bikes sprawled atop the flesh ones, their stinger teeth in the front yard

& the afterimage of a Suburban inverting bottle open in the front seat, retention ditch filled with stepfather’s poor decisions dinah crying out from behind construction paper & crayola’s descriptions of the hurt you’re allowed to name, delineated into discrete elements

cerulean for the lake they dug at the end of the cul-de-sac. grey for the glow of the television, playing while we sleep in deep syndication. green for the dream of future planted in tessellating tiles, erected every week & split down by fathers in a white t-shirts, tennis shoes on.

[sheismyshe-deactivated20190201]

“The Italian philosopher Vico had this theory that time moves more in a spiral than it does in a line. He believes that’s why we repeat ourselves, including our tragedies, and that if we are more faithful to this movement, we can move away from the epicenter through distance and time, but we have to confront it every time. I’ve been thinking about trauma—how it’s repetitive, and how we recreate it, and how memory is fashioned by creation. Every time we remember, we create new neurons, which is why memory is so unreliable. I thought, “Well if the Greek root for ‘poet’ is ‘creator,’ then to remember is to create, and, therefore, to remember is to be a poet.” I thought it was so neat. Everyone’s a poet, as long as they remember.”

- Ocean Vuong, What’s your mood when you write?

[isapassenger]

“i love you, but you can't stay” -- san francisco, ca

july 2017

[onemountaingoatssongaday]

Visit Original Link

And through the warm radio static I couldn’t hear my stage directions And the fog on the windshield Obscured our sad reflections

from Heretic Pride (2008)

[isapassenger]

in our neutral meeting place the episcopalian church yard

[isapassenger]

the topology of last night

does it matter how we get to the coast if away is the destination? every night beach exists in a parallel plane, circular about each axis. we’re hurtling toward tomorrow with no emergency brake, & find ourselves back where it all started. in the grass behind the wood frame house on the cul-de-sac. on the receiving end of a phone call, some bloodline you’ve been taught to love at a distance. at the ever expanding center of the hyacinth’s bloom, painting on the outer stars before deep black rains down & rolls off the glass of compressed human hours. we explore geometry in the three dimensions we’re still certain to inhabit. how many configurations can touch both blue & september? you pull a chorion over our heads to keep up safe from streetlamps spilling into my mouth on taraval, threatening to wake the morning early, it will come to cloth us in redwood, chrysanthemums, & light; reveal the truth of our annulation never ceasing, the arenophillic magic of time.

[isapassenger]

genesis of our long quiet

the first monsters i knew were all kind. they lived in the upper room, among carpet burns, manically repeating the language of early learners stop with a hard d, animal names referenced as the currency we used to purchase our bodies

sarah kicking out at the piano bench, hands too small to play the notes properly yet. just large enough to grab at your roots & not let go. your head miles above the earth, directing celestial objects in arcs about the room

rearranging tomorrow through sacred artifacts from the office. I B M, a three letter electric sonnet, & all the truth between snowstatic on the television. you led me to the black plastic altar & ran binary rites that taught me foreign capitals, the names of states, &

ancient history. your hand over mine, guiding it to the right location. was it even possible then, that you could have seen us at the diner? 2006. still sick in my alveoli, swimming amid ill fit clothing through the humid-heat night of our conversation.

long after you waded out from the world of poison ivy in white & bleach wash denim, the sky pulled down & spun around as new skin. weather held off until you came indoors, even florida waits for god & nothing has even been closer than your arms washing away chloroplasm in holy water

a voice coming in disconnected & ephemeral, long distance call from oregon. i read out scripture into the receiver, small words first, when max's single digits felt enlightened & prophetic. answering machine cleared before i got to the kitchen. does the holy ghost ever call

with neither of us there to answer? you between grocery store / office / & car dealership, pushing the blades through grass that stained my eyelids before the door & her threatened departure & sarah shouting hurt as the dandelions died, seeds unspread.

i feel the vibration in my pocket but don’t text back waiting in line / the pharmacy’s fluorescent mundanity / beneath the jagged sprites of who we’re becoming: 8 bit forms congruent to our shared lineage twin memories at low fidelity, forever repeating the pattern.

[isapassenger]

we made some gentle memories

alamere falls, ca june 2017

@augusthots & @lifeofamexican

[isapassenger]

seven years (vii)

in every version of the story you’re in the back of my car matching pitch with preternatural beings, horn calls come to signal that everything we knew will now be different. on an elevated plane above the sprawl,

taking communion with rain drops in the desert, at the center of puget sound on the upper deck, no words between us but i hope you understand you have always been the flashlight between pines in the meadow. you tended the sagebrush roots

between notches of my spine without even knowing. when they begin to come apart, loose with fatigue but for our connected concentric rings, i’ll kiss the night as it falls to greet the earth thank time for the kindness; our shared gentle world.