so says the straw hat

Oh, we are so close to being done!!! 29/30 1. so what now? dunno. well. it is your dream after all. oh. yeah. outside the day is a letter for a suicide that didn’t happen. just chicken scratch for rain. 2. when I found the cat picture I held it up to the light. no matter which way it bent, the cat remained hard to the touch. I put the cat picture in a crate, put a bowl of milk on the floor outside the latched door. wondered if this was another lie. While in the crate, I sang the cat all my favorite songs spoke secrets pushed yarn ends through the slats. When I found a couch I put it near the crate, and left all the locks on. 3. Charles Storrs is a ghost or only bones or that patch of grass in the shadow of the monolith where three boys sit and get high 4. so many poems about these hollow chambers 5. phloem: this is the layer that feeds on the ghosts

28/30? Maybe? 1. got a pet named skinny feed her thumbtacks with slips of paper folded up and punched through the pin. she likes how swallowing thumbtacks feels like crossing words out with a thick black line. 2. my monster always was a pair of eyes.

Alright. This is take two: Whatcha think now? 27/30 anatomy of a cemetery tree: (be symbiotic with me) outside bark is for protection against extremes and just inside are cells for growth, how expansion happens. sapwood is for soaking up all the ghosts and this is how branches grow stunted and sideways--making beds or bridges. the center is heartwood the center is dead is strong the heart is dead and it is a simple metaphor, my roots are stuck in ghosts, my heart is a cemetery tree and deep inside is iron and atoms, all strength and death. Then shallow inside is full of ghost water, swells to turgid, and outside I employ masons, they build brick walls. (grow slowly).

26/30 watching television: ducks gang rape. tanya harding is considered. people saw legs off other people. giant steel and canvas dirigibles are on fire. she was slowly poisoned by antifreeze. the radio announcer calls the crash terrific.

I was at a bonfire last night in Connecticut--the woods here have less underbrush. They don't smell like pine. 25/30 we use cell phones for flashlights find wood we use lighters like flint or friction keep searching while the fire burns down

24/30 roads wind so willingly and when the words run out I spend time looking into the trees for ghosts of civil war soldiers.

quasi-cheating. I wrote this in the last few days, don't know exactly when. I am road tripping, and am going to use it as my 23. I'll write 24 sometime and if my internet works later, I will post that one too! 23/30 smoked what will be my first and last cigarette tonight tried to figure out what you liked about the burn and the heat. Now, it is five in the morning and I can’t find sleep but every time I cough I taste just like you. I taste just like kissing you. I taste just like early Saturday mornings, like bedroom forts and beach castles. I am the front steps in the rain when we both knew it was over and you stood behind me and smoked another cigarette and I sat stuck on porch steps and peeling paint, because I couldn’t find my legs. remembering all the nights we went bowling in parking lots or sat on rooftops looking for constellations in city lights. Like when I showed up at four in the morning outside your sliding glass doors. I taste just like standing out there

So, I was writing this poem while taking trains and buses all around Chicago, running errands and I was standing in the Post Office prepping packages when I figured out the ending and I had to grab the chained down pen and write "naked, ice cream" on my hand. I hope the lady behind me in line was confused, frightened, excited...what have you. 22/30 On Purpose for RQT Lets have casual sex. I will talk about the weather. You can leave your socks on and we won’t even turn off the light. That way we can critique one another fairly. With a critical eye. Like you would an exhibit at the science museum—like a diagram in How Things Work and I will point out my flaws like they were brush strokes. These stretch marks may have gone unnoticed if the lights were off, if Barry Manilow had been on. And after I make these observations you will use some great cliché line like No, baby you are beautiful , (suggesting that my speaking brush stroke facts negates beauty). And after you

I dunno why people put disclaimers on their written in one day poems that say things like "this isn't done yet" because shit. I can't write a poem in a day! But anyway. Here are some drafts from today. I am putting two-ish because I think they go together but not quite yet. And I assure you, things will be cut out and reorganized and well. Hurrah. 21/30 1 today I want to shake the dust of poetry off my skin. It makes me sneeze. Makes me feel sleepy, like cats do, or pollen in the fields of grass. today I want to watch wheat and wind and not have words for the way it dances. want to wake up without a city I call home, wake up wandering with the hard imprint of sand on my cheek and I’ll brush that off too, just like I did the poetry and the dust. today, I brush off poetry so I can see the patterns sand stitches on your body and I won’t have to look for a story there and I won’t have to find anything besides beautiful. like it is. like it will be. beautiful.

20/30 Dear Chicago. I like your consonants best. ck. g. all your sharp edges and juts. the things you try to hide, but when you fold your arms, your elbows stick out like chicken wings. like the base of marble statues. like grave markers. I can’t whisper you. And I have been sleeping on this air mattress on the floor for almost a month and still I have not seen your backside. The parts you only show to the rivers or the trains. Chicago. You are endless. I am such an ant, the pathways I have memorized from home to coffee to music to home again. A month. And I don’t know your middle name. Just Chicago, and Illinois. I haven’t even seen the lake. The one you try to make seem like an ocean. The one that brought me this rain. your name spells the sound the train makes when I travel through your veins. sometimes, I watch the strangers move through their backyards. I like you best in the evening, when the sun makes your skyline look like cardboard or later when you become all b

this one is for Noah, who gave me the following recipe for my poem: bttyfowtsibb sidkwitohif iop boyofoyotoyo so I made this silly nonsense up! Thnx Noah. 19/30 be tyrannical though your festering orchestra will think such inclinations bewildering. be spontaneous in decisions. kiss wild inconsistent types often. have internet friends instead of people. be outgoing young. order fried oysters. yesterday. or travel on your own.

18/30 i imagine they keep the t.v. on until late into the night. i imagine it is hard to sleep when you are sick like that. so the television is like a lullaby or like a drug or like a porthole into a world where nobody has AIDS. because that is true nobody has AIDS on TV. she says it is always happy in the house, that all the littlest things make them happy. like pet fish or some home baked cookies or a song. they smoke cigarettes. so many cigarettes that it makes her want to smoke with them. maybe feel a little bit of their pain. she says that they look old, even though they are not. she says they wear too much cologne when they get dressed up for a night out. she says they are too sick to live alone. when are we ever built to live alone? so she sits up with them, watching late night television, eating cookies, feeding them pills, being the not in not alone.

17/30 my memory of you smells just like an old clarinet case with that crushed felt, the wood, the shiny metal keys. They make sounds like raindrops collecting on an overturned wheelbarrow. Like tracing the raindrops racing down the windows of the train. And the tunnels are the clarinet case when it is closed or what your ashes must feel like buried just under that red Hawaiian clay.

16/30 "I just let my brain rest when I paint flowers." -Renoir. My flower is a list. One. National Inquirer from March 21st, 2009 and my iBook G4. Seems like a synonym. Two. I peel grape skins off with my teeth. Consider the veined opacity that remains. Make more comparisons. Three. A very angry man yells at a window. The birds don't seem to mind. Four. The big bang is a grapefruit seed in a bellybutton. Five. I have trees in my lungs. Say it. Alveoli. Sounds like underwater love. Six. A father carries the hand of his baby-girl. She wears glasses, like him, wears a bright pink winter hat. He wears her tiny matching back-pack over his shoulder. Seven. Etiolate, I deny you sunlight. I save my memories in a peat bog. Mummify the brittle outline of your heartbeat under all these layers. Eight. fear. home. dependency. this plane that keeps crashing in the same damn spot all the time. habits. old t-shirts you never wear. bicycle seats. balloons. the recov

15/30 Your Name Means Late-Summer or Warlike Girl, you make me want to say girl in that way where the rrrrrr ’s roll out forever and the i becomes a u . Yeah. That’s right. And you make me want to roll up the bottom of my jeans, shove collected countries in the back pockets and collected men between my thighs. Stop collecting dreams. Girl, you make me want to rock climb—cover myself in that fine chalk powder dust, grunt like I want it, till my hand skin comes off in chunks. And you make me want to eat meat. Fuck chicken and fish. I mean steak. Cooked rare. Make me want to barbecue, corn kernels for floss and watermelon seeds for spitting. You make me want to shower in garden-hoses, drink BudLight around campfires, wear flannel. Want to tan like I was one-sixteenth Indian. Girl, you make me want to get high and ride public transportation with the retarded kids. Or stay up all night driving the screen saver into space. Girl. You make me want to slow. this. shit. down.

14/30 Aunt Dee had voodoo in her left hand and a bottle of wine and a cigarette in her right. Or maybe she just had 1981 scrawled so deeply into her bones that it came out of her like tin-foil hidden in tree branches or glass in the dirt or the crow on the wrong part of the wires. Then those buried years would glisten just under the skin or the wine-stained teeth and to me it was some kind of dark magic.

13/30 Once, I spent three days in a bivalvian embrace--clapped between siphons, spitting bubbles, pretending the world didn’t look like a VanGogh from so many feet under the waves. I nodded at all the appropriate times. I think storm clouds roll in like vinyl. I buried your heart out in the garden and weeks later my carrots looked like weeds. I never was one for gardening. I do not mean to say that your heart was a weed. The old ladies that are witches always let their gardens grow too tall. I read that our bridge in Pasadena is known as the suicide bridge. I read that the ghost of a mother haunts it, clutching her baby to her breast. In my mind, this bridge is made of chalk. Bends backwards and then folds over eight times. This makes you as small as you can get.

Well. Hmm. I think this one is silly, but all my other ones failed completely. And so. plus it is already 12:45 out in Chicago. But I think my poetry runs on West Coast time. 12/30 Silly Salad Today I married an avocado with an asparagus. I was not particularly inclined to do so, at first. I suggested to Asparagus that she could do better—that Avocado was far too fat for her, plus he was always watching that damned television. Also I was concerned about the pit. On the other hand, I tried to tell Avocado that Asparagus was awkward, because she is. And that nobody at the party would think her jokes were funny, because they aren’t. And also that Asparagus smells badly. Because she does. They didn’t seem to care. They protested but we are both green! And so in love! and so I cut them up, boiled one and cubed the other, dressed them beautifully and with little ceremony, they were wed. We all danced at the post-wedding party. Great wine. Shitty DJ--and Mushroom made a fool o

11/30 three unfinished letters to impossible items: Dear Texas. I heard you are lonesome. Don’t worry, I am coming. You bring me a pair of cowboy boots and I will make everyone in the bar square dance with me. Dear Texas. I bet you smile just like my friend Heather does. Dear Rose. Nobody thought you would end up the villain. Especially not when you were dancing through all the snow and rime. You were so brave then. Dear Sweet Potato Pot Pie. Jenn said that Unicorns are the new Chuck Norris but that Hobos are the new Unicorns. What do you think? I think the Easter Bunny is the new Jesus and you, dear friend, are the new Ham.

10/30 dreamed again. tonight I dreamed of making muffins and babies. I told you (unexpectedly) that you were the only man I'd ever want to make babies with and you told me I was beautiful every day for two-hundred-sixty-six days. we named our children Sweetbelly and Stickylove and when they were outside, we kept them in fruit trees and when they were inside we kept them in our arms. This is how they never learned the feet/ground rules. Then, when we loved too much, we would have to go check on the tomatoes. dreamed again. we didn't have a dishwasher, so that I could take my time with all those muffins. I smiled and told Sweetbelly to be careful. She had jam on her face and it was scorpion season; so then you wrote poetry about scorpions and jam--about sweet tomatoes and muffins. and when it was late at night I would wake and find you rocking Stickylove and fatherhood carefully in your arms--the way my mom used to find dad. Lost in that rocking chair; and then I would lov

(are these good enough for you, April? cos I am not convinced) 5/30 I wrote the start of a book about vaginas and four letter words and starvation and war. I won't finish it. I watched a movie about relationships. I won't finish those either. I wrote the start of a poem it goes like this: I was born a winter baby all inconvenience, ice and cold. 6/30 List of things viewed from the seven windows of the sun room: (Giddings Street, Chicago) 1. two ladies, young in appearance, wearing red jeans. 2. one squirrel, crosses the road, refuses a tree, scampers about the neighbors gate. I am distracted by a pigeon (who reminds me of a general) and lose track of the squirrel. He has crossed through three windows, reminding me of cartoon panels. 3. the bottom half of a flier, stuck to a tree, flaps in the wind. 4. three small birds (wrens?) land in the grass. Squirrel and Pigeon are there too. 5. tall and lanky man. I am overcome by a desire to marry him. 6. kids running. baby go

4/30 At one point, I tried to picture all those bodies piled up and burning. The survivor that spoke to my sixth grade class said we were so skinny we were sexless. So I made sure the bodies I imagined were of an indistinguishable sex. The drawing of mice helped. She saw a man take a baby by the hair, and fling it as far as he could and she did not flinch. She watched as the lines were split right and left.

3/30 Something about the birds. Something about how I don’t ever want to get married. Something about all my friends with new last names. Something about the birds. They did it, just all in fast-forward: Pranced around, false shows of strength and wit and fancy colors. Played coy. (30seconds). Followed by some sort of fantastic wrestling, all feathers and furious clashing. Trying to get away from one another just as much as they were trying to fuck one another. (five seconds). One left, the other sort of half-heartedly followed for a few short flights and then gave up. (ten seconds). Like how they do it in fast forward. Something about getting lost in Chicago on the drive home. Something about five minutes becoming an hour. Something about birds.

2/30 It must be five o'clock already in Chicago, the clouds are full of hail. The books on the shelf are segregated, one for fiction and one for non. I hear them shouting at one another. They shout letters of the alphabet. At the antique store on Western the son of the old man talks about the deal he got on the fabric upstairs--because some old lady died and nobody knew how much that fabric was worth In the room that is second to the entrance there are bins of old photographs. An old man squats, tending to a tree. Dad. Sun Morn. '48. I guess nobody knows, but I'm standing over these bins and I can hear the books at home yelling the alphabet at one another.

I didn't hear about the 30/30 till about 2 days ago. I'll start my own, and start it late. To be fair, I will try and pull from writing that I did on those dates. And quote directly. I heard this 30/30 challenge was supposed to be sans edit. So. Welcome to it. Nobody asked for it. 1/30 I dreamed of bears and of not hating the past tense of dream. I dreamed of bear wrestling and advertisements so suddenly I am there, with this man who wrestles bears. And bad turns quickly to worse when one child goes missing and the bikini-clad girls are called onto the scene to distract the bears. Fast forward this dream (wasn't it Flaubert that said only dullards tell others their dreams?) bikini-clad lady gets bit on the lip, baby-biting-bear turns into demonic child while bikini-lady tries to stretch off the baby-bear/child's face. In the end we all drown in an old pontiac driven by a man who keeps asking "why didn't you answer my email?!" I'll tell you wh