and now the waves unfold

how strange to hear arguments in my mind (a broken ribbon of wind) and sense them as being the most audible thing in a theater. the silence of a film casts our bodily functions into the spotlight. a digestive peep or squeal barely audible but high in pitch is cast out amidst such dark human sea and somehow understood by cave bellowing hunger pains that are deeper and further away. we speak our intestinal sounds as anchors and ports, ports and buoys to one another. we remember how we have been passing each other gradually, but only able to drift or float past one another to a certain unnameable distance.

i see a pan of foliage, my eye, foliage huntress, i spying and hiding in foliage. a thorn was always a stem. a stem was always a stalk.

i wanted to know beyond the blotches of new shapes and worlds that the light splotches cut and afforded my eye. but then i felt my eye wandering inward away from sight and i trusted what i didn't recognize because when it moved, panning into a brilliant light streak, it reminded me of being. when i thought i saw a galaxy of clouds expanding into a universe of night sky as snow clumps on a car's back seat window i forgot for a moment that a tree rings of a truer map of the body, its history a folded whisper. after that, i didn't want to know beyond my eye.

mocking birds perched on the same branch, surely a sigh of relief was heaved from our breast as we recognized there was no theme, there were no characters, there was no narrative unfolding. And to think that this absence had been unfolding around us all along.

communing with community

somewhere between fisherman's wharf and rebecca solnit is where my wandering and wandering imagination strolls into these days. the betwixt is less ghostly when you actively smile into a stranger's face. aside from being a super smeller, i listen to the way people who i don't know (yet) but would be embracing during an earthquake read my hands more, and i giggle over pedestrians' street corner complaints voiced into a phone or to a friend standing with them. it's one long exhale that i breathe in, a street sweeper of emotive outbursts or leakage. not waste or wasted. not want or wanted. sometimes, i feel like a tree being decorated all year long, ornamented, branches dangling with emotions of others; caught because my arms were just extended. little, tinseled looks flash from me, and it's here's looking at you, kid because i (that is) (am) you, is looking into your eyes, and we always were. we are that connected. so, that's a walk (yes, unto itself) i take daily. i essay, jaunt, trot, saunter, gallop, stroll, divert, meander through the yous' (that is, me) daily profanity that is also spun into a conversation, a narrative, a confession, a plea. a we is conceived (though rare perceived) in our passerby love. a couple of months ago, i thought i was one of the few ghosts in this city grappling with what it means to be a ghost, to embrace it. san francisco is the only city i've lived in where i feel the city with all of its structure in buildings emitting whispers (or sometimes screams) of history and culture living around me, supporting me in a way that is parental. our passerby love. not take or taken. give and given. fisherman's wharf swarms with the unreal, the ghostly. sometimes, i get excited flitting through all of these ghostial remains that are people rolling like movie scenes before my peripheral vision in any direction around me. this ghostly plane of places has become a kind of portal for me. i can go there and be instantly transported to the ghost i was in korea. here, all direction of walking is lost or has no place (in this no-place of sorts) as it is in asia. this cultural misconnection of mine (that does not exist in word) feels like home in its familiarity of disconnection and displacement. here, (or there) no one person speaks the same language; in fact, language is obsolete. everyone just wants, no, longs to wander, gaping upward or into corners, forgetting pedestrian safety, wanting to touch, to gaze, to wonder, to be everywhere in such nowhereness. being amidst that throng of pulsating ghostial terrain there also exists the ether of a slowness that is often neglected. the chaos gives time to allow early spring blossom scents to supersize themselves inside that ol factory of a nose of yours (mine). that is a small moment in capturing, i know, but it builds during our walk. during a stroll out onto pier 39, i was layered with sunlight that was almost a gutted salmon in coloring against a nimbostratus sky, and i met in such ether a tourist who asked me to take her picture with coit tower in the background and to get part of the wooden rail of the pier, too. she was from daegu, korea. we spoke in part korean, part english, each practicing words we thought we knew would surely connect a conversation together. but, when she (maggie) told me that she chose me to take her picture because of the look on my face, and when i told maggie that i stopped because of kindness in her voice, i knew that we had already conversed long before any words tried to effectively fall from our memory. words come from remembering or memory. they sometimes seem automatic, spontaneous, but we are speaking long before them with most people. they are the most reliable port in the storm. and they are pleasing to the ear and aesthetically pleasing to the eye, too. words come from memory. gestures, sounds, tones, things that we automatically feel but cannot voice without words are how we truly begin communication. we are made ghostly by words. we are most at home with others (ourselves) when we embrace our animals selves. to shake hands with the animal self of another without using words is small capturing, but it will build during our walk together.