mintwater

these are the days i rewire the scent of sunscreen.

it is no longer middle school summer camp
6 hour days festering with ice breakers,
costco wholesale snacks, and bead crafts.

we were some kind of cheap labor
folded inside-out and dipped in irony,
toiling through an organization’s
most cost-effective plan to
quell our adolescent energy with
gallons of Elmer’s glue and popsicle sticks
in activities strategically contrived to tout
brochure bullet points of ‘social development’,
implemented under the guise of enthusiasm by
college students looking to make a quick buck.

it was a best-seller in that necessary-evil market,
spawned from the petri dish of capitalism
as the lowest entropy solution to the
working parent’s perennial June-kids problem.

these are the days i spray on sunscreen
for my bike commute on open, unpaved trails.

i am seizing the scent for myself.

i hold no nostalgia for my time
as a prisoner of war.

maybe they are wavefronts propagating
through the different mediums of my mind,
taking their time to spend their energy
abrading my mental landscape of association,
weakening internal vaults
        for plaid shirts, curly hair, or that particular squinting smile
with hairline fractures that buckle in a sudden pang
triggered by a casual glance to across the room.

maybe i am an out-of-order processor,
scheduling the execution of my withdrawal
by priority of immediate tractability, deferring
emotions with complex dependencies for a later time,
        until a familiar expression comes up as a cache miss
that triggers a pipeline stall, taking me back to fetch
the buried pain and recirculate the things you said
that were so distinctly yours and
how much i adored them.

or maybe my subconscious is just a
bank of low-pass filters with very large taus
that have accumulated charge to their brims
and i spend weeks depleting
only nanocoloumbs at a time,
through the resistor of my heart
that burns so uncooperatively, with
the soft red glow of detachment.

she is kneading something with her fingertips
and her lips rest patiently closed
and her eyes stare forward, soaking the words,
and her thoughts are tucked deep
beneath the gearbox that turns inside.
        she is reading this
i hear the cogs clicking from
thousands of miles away.

i don’t know what
she thinks
anymore.

we graze the minutes by
in an ad-hoc concert
of ruffling wrappers,
as the jetstream
marks the tracks of
our oblivious flock.
the earth rotates slowly.
the sun burns eons on.

well, the truth is, i feel quite a bit.

but the only modulation that
escapes the bit-error-rate
of my dispassionate rationality
is words chosen carefully,
arranged into metaphors,
snuck into stanzas
written out
quickly enough
so my mind cannot
catch them in time
escaping with my emotions
strapped to their backs.

every poem i write is
full of these little critters
robbing my heart.
but, i let them.
i let them.

i left the light on at midnight,
and i was not coming back.

i couldn’t sustain the weight
of my father’s decree
to conserve electricity,
to ensure ties, or
to make amends any more.

it was raining, of course.
the real trek always begins
in a wash of white noise.
the water stirs my heavy sheet of dust
and through steps in my soaked clothes
it wrings out, bit by bit,
a trail of cathartic footprints
        i abandon.

my knapsack is waterproof, modern.
that’s about the only difference now,
otherwise, i am that same Roman
who left for another place
to desert his mixed feelings too.

a few miles later and the clouds dissipate.
he and i gaze up at the same star
that twinkles with the mystery of life,
like a timeless beacon of kinship
to all those who leave
the past behind and
start anew.

he was a sly smile,
a composed suit,
and a dry martini.

we were the audience that
scripted his part, lit his stage,
and invented the aesthetic.

somewhere along the way,
we forgot he was acting, and
soon we spent each day
pretending to be the same
movie stars we devised,
for an omniscient rolling camera
absorbing our lives onto holy film.

so here we are now.

a cosmic playground of common spirit
wearing masks, rotating casts,
acting out an elaborate script
to keep our universe from
collapsing into boredom.

for we forgot we invented
the camera and the film,
too.

the scent of russia in diesel, and
the large beer i split with you.
the sighting of a familiar frame
soon to be new bike equipped
for the hills that near closer.
falling asleep with a hint
of friday-night ethanol.
waking up to remaining work
that will conclude one chapter,
and immediately begin the next.

these are the things that
give me pause
tonight.

I woke up to a start from a daydream. Why did I ever think it was real?

Notions blossomed into comfortable truths like sudden plot twists that take place too fast to stir you, like non-sequiturs slipped under a rug to evade an audit — pretty rugs of straight-faced actors for millenia at a time, till everyone gives up a second thought and forgets it was someone’s play. It was too cushy and grand to disturb.

A glimpse outside of it and you can never come back to what amounts to he-said-she-said to the very start, recycled into an endless show supplied by an endless cast. I am tired of the theatrics and I long for the outdoors. These guys are hushing me now — keep quiet and pay attention. They whisper that numbers mean something, that they have “personally validated” it, and that besides, what else is there to do? The red glare of the exit sign gnaws at me in my periphery.

I woke up to a start from a daydream when I realized that every other person was a human being, that anyone that has ever thought, said, or wrote anything was human, that I can do those things too, and that there is no greater leap of faith in this world than conferring authority to another human.

In retrospect, that was always the most important lesson of education.