Another Thing Witches Do

At last one's dreams clarify - in particular those after waking at 3:16 as always - and the cities we never visit visit us and insist on their legitimacy. The calendar says winter but living is modular: nothing can be trusted absolutely as nothing operates outside of the collective.

Side yard maples have been a persistent image, right up there with chickadees and blowjobs. Lately the recurring fantasy is just a couple of days alone with sandwiches, cannabis and a pile of books, free of the many expectations that have so resolutely dogged me in this life.

We join so much with "and" and "but," often without exploring the nature of the subsequent implied relationships. Aches in my back and shoulders that make morning chores difficult but not impossible, not yet.

It's not that I'm not scared of death but that I don't understand the given reasons to be scared and so it remains a possibly solvable problem. Something lovely, something luscious, something to lick.

One of the tricks in writing is to keep going when you'd rather stop, to risk not being bad so much as bored, and to see what happens next. So much is hidden away and really who has time to go searching for it?

The dolls she makes by hand over a period of weeks put me in the mind of the witch in Hansel and Gretel and force a new reading of that familiar text, which is another thing witches do. Remember that little Greek island, drinking bitter coffee in the morning, watching fishing boats leave the harbor and wondering was it wrong we wanted to live there forever.

There will always be birds I do not know the name of, and there will always be this relationship with what I do not know. The Man without Shoes asks what are the odds.

Early February, the south-facing window barely reflected in the west-facing mirror, the frost blossoms faint and narrow. We who collect images, create interior totems thusly, and lug them everywhere as if God were more than an understanding of probability.

What is it that you defend? The (deceptive) simplicity of subjective awareness, again.

A prayer aimed at Jesus unexpectedly hijacked by his mother informing you you aren't even close to the source of the generative mythology. The moves one makes when they still believe what can be kept a secret can also be called love.