I'm not sure how long its been. It's still spring- 3 weeks?

I lose time, all the time.

I remember, I was looking out into a brick alley, this one, and staring at the insects as they swam in and out of the dirty ochre dusk like fireflies along a solitary Cuban road . That's important somehow. I don't know why. My hard drive's been erased. My memory card is full.

These bloody days I'll remember forever: Blood red skies, burnt bridges, and the embers of pulpy conflagrations; paper mementos sent to the heavens as smoke. Our life together in neatly labeled boxes, broken down into simple geometry and a few unspoken words. The darling buds of may indeed have yielded to cinders as the crimson leaves bleed from the heat of the hearts of a thousand red tailed foxes.

These bloody days I'll remember forever: forever they seemed to drag like honey in the cloro-floro-carbons. They've stained the sunset and they've stained my windows.

Humid brick, pigeon down, house sparrows fucking, and old wood. I'll remember these smells next year especially.

I'll remember to forget you. This time.

I am not the same –but I also haven't changed.
Its hard to explain –but it's the same everyday.

I don't know if I am coming or going. The empty loft offers little help. On this mixtape, in one of the boxes, I heard:

"Smile all the time.
Shine your teeth to meaningless.
Sharpen them with lies.
And whatever's going down
Will follow you around
That's how you fight lonliness
You laugh at every joke
Drag your blanket blindly
Fill your heart with smoke
And the first thing that you want
Will be the last thing you ever need"

I think I sent myself a clue. It's the first song on the tape. And its my handwriting.

And I do appear to be alone.

"Just smile all the time"

And rearrange the loft like I was rearranging my bedroom at my first house in Surrey, at 9233. I remember the maps I made of bike paths and puddles. I gave names to glacial erratics and stumps. I formed a river from a drainage ditch, made mountains out of molehills.

These mixtapes are like maps (to the past). These maps are like mixtapes. Mixed messages. "On the surface and clearly mixed".

"I've been in deep before. I've spread those maps out on the kitchen floor".

It's hard to tell how long I've been alone, I've been lonely for so long.

"I play your song to just to hear you say that you, you're the lonely one".

Another clue. Side B. Outside is mixed cloudy periods; muggy and beige. The light is like flourescent frosted office lights. Like a sweaty greenhouse filtering and cleaning the warmth of early june into a tungsten glow.

Its times like these.

Staring out dusty windows as the particulates split the twilight into a thousand shades of infra-red, ultra-violet, and any other spectrum in between. Its as though the clouds were blushing at the coming eve's unknowns, all that lust and lonliness the darkness does well to hide. Everything is turned inwards. You're not alone. All the faces you've met and have yet to meet, staring back.

"People have (with the help of conventions) orented all their solutions towards the easy and towards the easiest side of easy; but it is clear that we must hold to what is difficult; everything alive holds to it, everything in nature grows and defends itself in its own way and is characteristically and spontaneouisly itself, seeks at all cost to be som and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must hold to what is difficult is a certainty that will not forsake us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it" .

And so:

The warm, wet, messy embrace of melancholy, so familiar like a flu, floods over me. I am standing in a lake with my clothes on shouting "I am a big fan of radio control". This sadness, so full of life like cherry blossoms laden and rotten with a late spring rain.

We walk arm and arm again like old friends through an arch of ivy, oak, and hemlock, the hot breath of fresh cut grass, the smell of cigarettes and windex, the smell of a million little lives bursting forth on a pile of molding mulch.

Such is the solitude of nature that man must cling to. In all its dirt and cold, wet defenses; in all its murky nooks and crags; the branches through fences; in all its lurking ambivalence; in all it systems and solipsism, the dialectics of chaos; a billion eyes and a billion places to hide.

She grabs my hand. I am standing on worn wooden dock, wide and worthy, on a modest pond, with the buzz of dusk ringing in my ears…

She pulls me under.

I close my eyes and sleep in the soft, silicious ooze at the bottom of the pond. Green shards of algae clouded light stab downwards but she reaches around me with her loosestrife arms and caresses me until I dream.

I dream of simple things. Places and memories boiled into a fluid image. The Science of Sleep. And the emotions of time. I dream of the cheap and banal, the obvious, the platitudes of "those who have found themselves mute and sullen in humdrum duty" .

I settle in deeply to the soft pragmatism of sleep. The reticence of words eschewed by a simple sense of purpose –purposefully clouded by whatever your subconcous thinks up next. Where everything and anything can and will change at once. Where feeble existentitalists work until hungry, and man's most dense of tradtitions are eaten up by the slow, darkening, morass of deep rest.

"I believe in the night".

Alas, once again, like the longest night, and the shortest day, "everything that happens keeps on being a beginning" and I come to. These bloody days I'll remember forever. Its times like these.

Leave me for the timeless.

Leave me for the mist that made the morning. Leave me for the fermament of a mid fall's fog, for the foragers hands and the simple man's sullen eyes. Leave me for the still, for the steady seconds of a heaving wood. There in the thick air, among the lichen's golden hair, and the fern's ecstatic embrace.

There in the darkness.
And.
There in the light.
Leave me there.
To grow in circles
Wider and bigger
And to rot.

Meanwhile the norhtern wind's morning routine carries in a battalion of broken-winged saints placed there patiently by a bank of careful cottonwoods. They catch the light and latch on, let go when the signal's weak. Plumes of pollen parachute in like Allied spies, the exhausted soldiers of commerce, unaware as I lay there.

I've been sleeping again.

My only clue the foreign sound of starlings stirring in my vivid dreams, pulling me again, with her gentle hand, this time outward, into the day.

I've got to stop starting the days like this.

The hardwood floors aren't so hard any more. My soft skull nudges a groove as I lay there writhing, the window framing a patch of sunlight on the warm, waxy, deep red wood.

A soft, early summer breeze belies the dusty dandruff air inside. The dry brick wrapping itself around the room. The crisp, white, plaster ruined by the weeping dew of a rose-shelled dawn.

I'm taking the poet's advice, letting the solitude wash over the bones of my past, fill in the cracks between walls, build braces and brackets that hoist the vaulted ceiling of my cathedral high into the young season.

And may they crumble again, and be used again. Reclaimed and built back up like barracks to house the soldiers of the great romance –that great reckoning.

"The hour is striking so close above me, so clear and sharp, that all my senses ring with it. I feel it now: there's a power in me to grasp and give shape to my word. I know that nothing has been real without beholding it. All becoming has needed me. My looking ripens things and they come toward me, to meet and be met".

I can be nothing I am not. I am the great namer of things and everything's been named. Even this sturdy room would collapse without the timber of my imagination, left anonymous in the rubble of a thousand lesser cities.

If this is how it shall be then let it be so.

If I close my eyes and reopen them, are not things arranged the same, in their place, as reliable as tools? The same hammer used to destroy is used to rebuild. I am but a single nail. A brief lonely figure, yet without whome this house, with its histories a hundred fold, wouild be unfinished, like a thought or a child. Or the thoughts of a child.

Un petit mort. I finally understand it now. Like how I now know of the sun's many seasons.

So I scream, and let my screams be eaten by hungry mouths. Let my stale sadness feed their children, and later when we are older and ripe like late harvest grapes, when our houses are razed, we will feed on their laughs.

But now I'm waiting for time. Its late. Its getting late out earlier. Soon will be forever. I chose to not make a choice because eventually everything will happen.

"I'm afraid to be afraid, now I'm afraid" .

I must be doing something right.
I must be doing something, right?