honestly

beyond things like
coffee makers and
bowls of soup and
being the-coughing-kind-of-sick,
beyond the phone calls, the
newspapers and Elvis's good years,
in between justice and Dick Cheney,
screenplays and short stories,
hiding behind posters of Gogol Bordello
and Elijah wood in Everything is Illuminated,
seeping from the pages of American Psycho
and Geek Love,

you
torment
me.

I hate when you chew gum.

Is it important that you feel it,
or important that you share what you're feeling?

seperate serpents

Overcoming my fears, realizing they're
easily replaceable,
replaced and
dear dear dear,
another year,
yearly never
really
being my
year.

I fear what may
come
of things
of what I've done,
especially,
and coming un-
done, regularly,
and sweating small things,
involuntarily.

The large things
no longer existing,
and this thing
that I do,
'listening'
to my own advice?

You'd think it was my intention
to forget the way I do,
not to mention,
my mal-formed
opinions and
judgments
I forget
which one I
really
believe
in.

I don't know because
maybe, just
may
be,
I don't
want
to.

in my thoughts always

My most prominent fear is aging.
My bones brittle and skin spotting, crawling away from me, my mind and thoughts deteriorating with the rest of me.

Yet,
I see my grandmama and
I don't think
I've ever seen
anything more

beautiful.

All her stories,
all the different ways she's
loved and fought and
cared.

Little pieces of her scattered everywhere,
she's been bulldozed and built over.
Still seeing a field where a building blocks the sun, she sees a corner mom-and-pop store where there isn't one.

And in this way,

I live
vicariously
through
her.

And still,

Perhaps bloggin' is making me a second-rate author.

Truth is, I don't know what I would publish if I had the chance.
Probably 'The Jessi Green Reading Matter" with a smorgasbord of things like poems, thoughts, advice, pick-up lines, drawings, and ickle stories. Stories like, "How I Made the Best Salad in the WORLD."

Children's literature could be fun. I could even illustrate my own.
What I wouldn't give to be an author like Roald Dahl. Dahl is king. Minus his cookbooks. Norwegian recipes include things like 'Fish Pudding' and 'Creamed Cabbage.' Not that enjoyable, I assure you.

Okii Mama

This right here is my cat.
She has many names.
Her official name is as seen in the title.
My brother calls her 'Kiki'
I call her 'Smokey Okii'
Mom calls her 'Cat.'
She is one hawt mama.

The art of losing, and all it's tentacles.

I bite
my lip
as I think,
I wish I could sound


detached
from you.


I wish you were a pair of keys,
the sunglasses already on my head or
a note attached to
the fridge I miss completely in a rush
out the

door.


So that coming home, after the day being what it was,
you'd watch me
ever so
secretly

from your spot under the counter or fridge or sofa,

watch me sidle through the door, exhausted,
slip off my shoes,
and find somewhere to rest.

Peeking from your spot, seeing my tired eyes and wilting hands,
my aging at work.
And you'd wish that
you were

in
my
hands.

Thanks a heap, Dad.

I just found out that I have a sister.
She's my age, and she lives in De Soto, Missouri.


My life just turned into a soap opera.
Anyone second that?

'cause I wanna hold yours too

There are so many things that I need to remember.
To think and need and want, and
I can't seem to keep them all straight.

You can always be as confused as you want,
with your life, yourself and things.
But you have to make sense, don't you?



I think that maybe telling the truth to
make yourself feel better..is selfish.

:)

1: "I mean, watching the two of them is physically painful for me."
2: "Is it kind of like watching Catherine Zeta-Jones and Michael Douglas?"
1: "A little."

Dear Elusive,

I have finally solved you.

You left no notes.
And asked for no pens,
not even to pretend
you would have.

I got something out of my system writing this.

My mind is running 20 thousand miles an hour and I stop only
to realize that I haven't been running at all, that I've only just started
walking. Only walking around and around always.

Forever and always.
It's sounds promising, doesn't it?
It's what is written in my cards
every christmas.

And what I see on billboards and posters
of young lovers and their bliss and their
hands, holding eachother in eachother
and things like that.

Walking into store and the people,
oh those people! They talk with their tongues just, and I think,
"Wow. Those tongues can really move!"

They're dancing, is all.
They're dancing around things on television commercials.
The pills and the babies and the pills and the elderly..

Oh those poor pills.
Poor, poor pills.
Sitting in nursing homes.
Not helping at all.
They probably wish they could help somehow,
those poor pills.

Better, better

Television shows are as a rule incredibly unrealistic.
With things like always, no matter what, getting great advice that somehow always works out in your favor. Things like perfect kissing and always having that 'moment' when you just see fireworks.

But some things that I have in fact always been able to relate to on the fictitious television shows I watch, is the ability I lack for one: to let go. Another is the habitual need for nostalgic comfort.

They still suck the soul out of you.
But fictitious television is just another provider for something we all seek.
Connection.

What do you do?

When something you’ve known most of your life is over?

Hitchhikers

From my point of view:
I don't really know whether to laugh or to cry so I do both, periodically. I don't know whether to feel angry or sad, bitter or indifferent. So I have all of those feelings about a single subject in one day.

From your point of view:
You don't have any reason to be angry or sad or bitter or indifferent or to question your choices in life because, simply, you settle.




Now I have my swinging back and forth from this to that to another. I am confused at times and adamant the next.
But I refuse to settle. On anything.

Variation On the Word Sleep
Margaret Atwood

I would like to watch you sleeping,
which may not happen.
I would like to watch you,
sleeping. I would like to sleep
with you, to enter
your sleep as its smooth dark wave
slides over my head

and walk with you through that lucent
wavering forest of bluegreen leaves
with its watery sun & three moons
towards the cave where you must descend,
towards your worst fear

I would like to give you the silver
branch, the small white flower, the one
word that will protect you
from the grief at the center
of your dream, from the grief
at the center. I would like to follow
you up the long stairway
again & become
the boat that would row you back
carefully, a flame
in two cupped hands
to where your body lies
beside me, and you enter
it as easily as breathing in

I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed
& that necessary.

Primus

I have so much anxiety due to
your ability to
break me and my heart.

A first!
Usually I break my own before this point.

calm?

I can't, in words, explain to you how this, how I, feel.
I am so unbelievably forgetful that I..well I let important things slide by that area of my brain marked as MEMORY. I let them slip from me into oblivion, into the back where the smokers of my mind lurk, feeding off of nothing but themselves.

Did you know that the central processing unit of a human brain only has seven memory registers? Which means that if you have seven things on your mind, and you think of something else, one of the other just casually drops off of the edge and out of your head?

I remember this ickle fact and immediately think of:
Book jackets.
How cold this room is.
I wish I had a jacket.
Too bad you can't tote your entire wardrobe with you on vacation.
How much I wish I wasn't on vacation.
How much my relatives had to drink before clamoring into this hotel room.
Wade.
Wade.
Still Wade.

And it continues.

I love this.

Photo By:
Avery Enderle Wagner

I'll sing to you, Jenny
I'll let you know
when the war is won and done

I'll carry your books until
all the dirty looks are through
pointing at you

And all your pretty picking
flowers from the their sticky
points of view
would be of no use
to you

This is for you..

Jenny can't can't can't
because she's done done done
'cause she's done
with this one

And I'll just shoot shoot shoot
from my handgun gun gun
I'm not done,
with this one,
I'm not done.

I have nothing but a yellow flower in my inventory.

You're plucking eyebrow hairs and gluing your
smiles to the sidewalk,
and I can't pass idly by
and want nothing more
than to join you.

I need a new, something anew,
some new you to
write about you.

Not that I mind writing about you,
or you for that matter,
but a new
new
you
would be nice,
too.

why?
and how much...?
time-wise, we're looking at
a lifetime
of wrong turns
and late mornings
and early nights
and this with that mixed in
like a combination
of six soft drinks, drank in
less than a minute

eating the edges of the computer screen,
hungry hungry hippos, hungry for
attention and contact and social sedation

take me, shaking with my fingers wrapped around
a vile of my own excrement
my own experiment gone awry and you
are gulping all the fresh air from this
tiny,
stuffed room

a selfish, selfish need to breathe, to live
and plan things and make dates and drink yourself dry,
your skin ashy and such a contrast to
your smooth, angelic
face

Cincinnati

That looks
like
violence,
but he wears it so
proudly and
I find I like the way
his hips
swing
almost like he has a
purpose when
everyone else has lost
or not yet found
theirs.

This hurts.

I'm wearing stomach pain like a pro.