WALKING THROUGH MEMORIES

Jeremy Hight

“Walking through memories” is an ongoing project of taking a place in memory and turning in it… moving in it… forcing the brain to fill it while seeing holes next to deep details, a kind of reporting that comes out in poetic theoretic shards. The larger project is going to tie to a book of personal narrative but of lost islands inside and turns never taken as well as first person shooter spaces made of each memory with holes and crazy walls and all to be tied vaguely to online maps as both a memory layer and play on locative media. Each text is written in about 5 minutes with no edits.

Jeremy Hight is the author of two books with a third soon. His book “What Remains” (published by Free Dogma Press) is a short story collection composed by taking all tech and sci fi out of sci fi films and taking what remains into prose. His collaborative narrative work once edited live by earthquake data, “Carrizo Parkfield Diaries” is in the Whitney museum artport. He is currently working with Damon Loren Baker on prose that changes based on how it is read. He teaches Creative Writing and English Comp and lives with his soul mate Lisa and his amazing cat Samson.

February 24, 2017

Window
Some night 1985

Her hair is a forever here.

She went from friend drawing poems backwards on my skin to first love this night, this island.

The Byrds on a turntable all night on repeat in a huge Granada Hills windstorm restless all around.

Boy me was sure he would live alone till his end, was sure of it in fact.

Her parents divorced and she moved to Texas. A billion miles then.

Here she is quiet beside me, an endless peninsula, comfort, love, warm.

Hours before was airport, traffic, nerves, squalls of doubt but here no words, no space , no time.

Later she will fall out of this love. I will find the wind to be cruel , full of dust and teeth cold.

But now, here, her hair is forever and silence bends only to breezes out a window.

∞

February 19, 2017

Shimmers
Some day and month 1986/7
Mom’s face shimmers here in an internal sun.
She sits in a chair holding her cane with glasses on.
This afternoon holds cut clean with brilliant false summer afternoon in me now.
She is at peace. She even slightly grins as some now erased body dives into a pool.
She is a decade now passed to ashes. Her goodbye was a cloud for a second.
Her body soon after no longer let her come to pools, to open vaults of afternoon.
My youth died into lines on my skin. That afternoon died into past.
But I turn now in this memory and my mind races to paint in pale fetid fences, distant dullard false forgotten roofs, that sky
but she shimmers here.

∞

February 12, 2017

Breathes
Some summer month and day 1980-81
the water is infinite here…a pocket forever….splash and pool..
the friends now have long been shorn names but one…
their faces and haircuts shiver and alternate around the surface and in dives here
the joy is palpable….the heat of that afternoon is as well..even as time acts as moths
a loud splash now in the Hockney abstracted pool of some special occasion
it births a bloom in blue….it ignites in a past lit within
I turn now in this memory and sky is endless and then a cloud shimmers into view
the backyard breathes for a moment..inward…then exhales…

∞

December 28, 2016

Her
Some day and month December 2005
There is forever (till my eyes forever close..shut off memory’s internal sun and shore) a soup of faces, music colors , walls. I am at some holiday party. A beer is in my hands now again gone. My roomie (now my wife) is up visiting her parents. We love each other as best friends but have not yet fallen in love, soon soon. The walls here have been eaten away to errant false sky, some blue, some painted with light clouds, one black with a trillion glistening false stars ( of her….not of night or the cosmos). The crowd is of some party but now is just colors, lines, shadow forms with no names, the music is silent, this is a cloud of what once seemed important, an event once surely of some portent and measure. I was alone in that crowd, infinitely so. 700 miles away she felt the same in some other now worn clean crowd , held in the thin false arms of event and moment. I turn now in this memory and for a second feel that cold loneliness, it is needles, then away. My love is near, nearer than I knew.

∞

December 19, 2016

Bird
Some day and month 2012
I am about to teach at U.C San Diego. I am a body of quakes in fog forever here. The fog above is tides now, shifting, easing , forever roaring forward and cowering away. The sound of distant jets is gone now in this memory, worn away to its synaptic grave then erasure.
The campus is a cement Jenga in recall these few years later, a Rubik’s maze of walkways and buildings. I was so excited and nervous, so swarming with uncertainty under my old coat. I turn now west in the memory and groves emerge, trees, birds breaking fictions, a sun then cloud then somehow both at once as though within some atmospheric treaty all became gold and grey. The bus rushes past of a hundred buses in that year, its wheels the turn of some ghost of metal and rubber, of the days of 3 quarters and their weeks bled down to this visage that turns north and curls away.
Somewhere ahead past this first day beginning are more squalls of nerves, a blur of lecture, the joy of meeting brilliant T.A’s and a conversation to unfurl after class for hours with an amazing group of students I am honored to now call friends. Here forever is that raw ore of beginnings, the blur and crisp detail before it all fills in. Gone is the broken hinged valise in my hand, replaced for a moment by a bird and now of more atoms in recall of open air, wide open space.

∞

August 16, 2016

Fog
Some day and month 2000
They are human fog here. There once were faces. Late evening at the art openings in Chinatown. A scrap of fog turns to me here in this space in memory and silence drizzles where once was surely something about theory or news of a friend involved in something somewhere now also washed down to a smooth near nothing here. Another fog bank surely was a group of fellow Cal Arts alumni, it drifts now along a wall that shifts color and size that once was a gallery. I look upward now in this memory and the sky is infinite knit stars then rain then low clouds, a menagerie of stand ins, like the characters in an errant dream that surely once were some tangential acquaintance, tethered by names, locations, old stories soon to rot clean but hanging so tenuous. I turn again now and fog moves in all directions, one surely once calling me by name.

∞

August 1, 2016

Moon
Some summer month and day 1995
The beach glows here. The menagerie of warm stones once were smiling faces with names, co-workers on a shared night and its stars and sand. The group home for disabled kids was grueling work but incredibly rewarding. One boy chased the moon with a pool skimmer sure it napped in shrubs during the day; he swore in his few words he would be gentle and feed it milk. Another boy carried toys in his clothes as a sort of protection against growing up and the hills of the world; we drew together and storyboarded films he saw in his mind.
The breeze is forever here on that beach some distance north of that house. The sky hangs low packed with stars near to touch now breathing in recall like the ribcage of the near infinite. We sit in the sand here laughing soundlessly at a joke about a moment in recall. A memory slice before we shared stories of how amazing these kids were and how it was an honor to help. The sand is lit impossible now in memory, warmed somehow by the emotional ballast light and deep still remaining. I turn now in this memory and hills appear and then shrug away in unison into that sky. A wave breaks on an impossible shore. The sky suddenly is illuminated by a great harvest moon, surely ready to nap later on into day for a boy to catch.

Desert
Some month and day 2000/2001
This memory is jagged teeth. This memory is mottled. This memory is being disintegrated by that hot false internal sun. There are deserts in recall, beyond maps, beyond miles. We threw ice cubes from a balcony now time rotted away along with the whole hotel. We had a conversation that was profound that now is eaten away by time like a thousand hungry mouths. I turn in this dying memory and the room is a great nothing, a carpet of patterned infinite empty, a ceiling thrown skyward to dull clouds , my friend is a reverberation in the cosmos here now as he once spoke, nothing more, nothing less.

∞

July 26, 2016

Silence
Some summer night 1992
It is 5 a.m endless here. We ride silent as the city is so much geometry and light. The music was roaring in the warehouse that only secret maps led to. Now the universe fingertips touches the edges of his car, a Jetta. We are 3 in the lines and vectors and shine and shadow. The day will be a fog of sleep and is unborn here. There is no language here, no typography, no discourse, no leaking in of the world and its steady breath of war and fear. This is a slice in memory when nothing needed to be said and things were simple the spinning of wheels, the lines of road, the false suns of streetlights. I turn now in this memory and the car seems to expand to the night skies fogged then star pinned then seems to reach back like fabric along my skin. There is a sign that once sold some produce, announced some near future now long past. The window is pure math then shine and gloss then nothing at all.
We were co-piloting something wordless and glimmering pristine for these few moments and miles. We wore this silence and surely gently mourned when the sun burned it clean into day.

∞

July 17, 2016

Fade
Some day and month in summer 1995

Her face evaporates here. Forever it is mist, vapor, mites, dust, soon to be nothing. This is the end of that goodbye. She is not the last hug, feeble and uncertain, skin to skin , universes breaking, spilling. She is not the last wave now falsely remembered as behind the icy glass of bus doors on Geary in San Francisco. That is something robbed from movies long ago watched. She said something sad and faint that in recall now is just the soft bloom of an opening mouth in the gauze of so much forgetting. Our love once seemed a fragile forever. She explained her self on that napkin with her blood as equations, her future as a doctor as a gift back to her relatives who were not able to, of her past, the roads of blood, the cities of another country. Her hair was meadows, dense in breezes but not here. She begins to break into some kind of smeary incompletion in this moment , atoms shot to mythology, details shot to nothing and the gaping black mouth of past. I turn now in this memory and the streets are impossible stores and homes, a San Francisco a touch away tangible and a billion mile impossible. She fades here as I surely began to fade to her.





Into this
July 4 1982/3/4
The fireworks tumble downward here, unblooms black as the night skinning the dying of day, ash falls, slow charcoal painting sky downward into the smoke of their once glowing lives. There is quiet and the distant murmur of families packing up blankets and garbage that just moments before were snacks and a temporary home as the sky was alight.
I see the synaptic dying photos of that boy in old photos. He had my name, my fingerprints, these eyes. He died like those fireworks into the boys after, the teens , the young adults, the iterations, dead now into this middle age. If a life was sky then this now (soon to be mottled past as well) is the impetus of a crowd of dying fireworks, of the glow and fall of pasts, of its places, its contexts, its situations, the crowd of strangers of memory.
I turn now in this memory and fell a pull and ballast of great loneliness, of a deep tide of feeling misunderstood, it is the boy of this memory, it is his pains and the darkening skies; it is so tangible now yet the park is blurring, shifting forms, breaking. I turn back now and mourn this memory and the broken dock of self, of how this boy died into my teen years never knowing more lights would come in another sky, that he would be loved someday. He breaks again from me now, the memory fades to a single image of a dying firework above a tree.


∞

June 18, 2016

The storm
Some day and month 1983

The roof is an orchestra here. The storm came at the tail end of an el nino storm and was one thunderstorm in a pool of cold air that covered half the north pacific. I am in 5th period honors English here in this synaptic tide pool and its wavering architectures. Mom waits well at home outside this memory, her body not yet failing her or her words. Dad is at work. My brother is another school across the valley. I am in 8th grade and dreamed of being a ghost, flesh of fog, sinews of vapor. The storm anvil cloud filled the sky on the bus ride to school and so huge and lumbering it took most of a school day to come and darken the sky to wear the dull lights were fooled into assuming night and illumination against the skies. 
I turn now in this moldering memory and the south wall of the classroom is an absurd and impossible jellyfish of lockers and tiny windows, then peacock feather false eyes of glass where surely was just dull utilitarian paint and grammar tips. The storm is about to rage here. The tree out the north window will soon be stripped of leaves and some branches. The courtyard between dull school buildings will soon turn white with hail, an erasure of sorts. A tornado will skip our school and touch down blocks away. The roof now is bubbling upward in flawed recall, the teacher is an absence in a suit. My classmates are just hair and colors, a boy turns to ask me some long forgotten question now and his face is a cave, a hole, nothing with a flock of seagulls do above. There is ominous quiet before the first rain drops hit outside.
Mom never saw the storm. Her mind never held it as passenger. She saw light rains. Her past moment was worlds away as though the storm was never born in the sea. It approaches in the auditorium of my synaptic recall forever as I age and mourn that boy in that day.

Shimmer

Some day and month 1977

All is water here. Sky is pool is glass is bottle is humidity. The era is now in recall a smear of earth tones, a thick carpet, more metal and smoked glass in the world, more shadow in places that served steak, disco dancing while cleaning the garage in a house so long cut umblicus from me and my days. This summer afternoon is swimming next door with the neighbours from Chile who were family to us and us to them. The youngest daughter I was close to and would stay up all night watching old badly fading horror films in Spanish to get up early for cartoons. We swore forevers until everyone moved away and that decade died into the next as they do. The world is water here, endless shimmer, sky mirroring the cut rectangle in backyard. I spin now in the water in recall and it breaks like the skin of polaroids, ruptures open and for a second there is a black and white photo of the alley behind our small houses. The sky to the west is unfinished, stitched blue. The roof is almost drawn in some anxious mental pencil and then again all now is shimmer, infinity blissfully as water.

∞

May 30, 2016

Kites
Some month and day 1997
We fly kites here. This day and its memory is a ruin, a near clean erasure, decay as sky, forgetting as skin and fields.
I live in the on campus apartments at cal arts here. It is my first year of the writing MFA. I also pass a kite to a now faceless husk in an ever shifting shirt and pants who once seemed friend and shared these days in the same space. He is a cave with hair as he sends it skyward. Somebody says something…some smudge of a figure rotten flat in recall runs down the almost bled to nothing grass below the windows.
I turn around now in this memory and Cal Arts is floating in endless pale sky.
An old emotion rises up now, a gassy jet within. A joy mixed with anxiety , a bubble of that now near dead day. Beginnings lie behind and far after this day distilled, ends as well.
We fly kites here.

∞

May 29, 2016

Mass and measure

Some month and day 1993
I want to disappear forever here, become fog, dust, smoke curled along the far off hills, ashes on the wood of the stairs somewhere, mathematically broken down to tiny filaments, motes, atoms as eyes then away.
San Francisco. San Francisco State university. I am a new student in this cheese slice of memory in decay moth eaten by days and miles from this once “here” and seeming “everywhere”. It is a lost night here and I walk slow behind my dorm, the sky a wet skin against mine, sagging, heavy, almost breathing in the cold ocean breath of the west city.
I ride passenger in the mind of that stranger in the few photos of this time, I recall pale flacid ghosts of what his eyes once saw, the road is wrong, it must be, the cars in recall are the same station wagon eating fog with high beams as yellowed teeth repeatedly as I move in mottled memory. Impossible.
I turn now in this soft worn memory (old passenger in some synapse) and the dorm is windows and walls as cement pale ephemeral, the road is snake bite loud rocks where surely was simply asphalt, the fog is gone now, cold dead into open sky and the ashen face of silent observing moon.
I wanted to die here, be erased, be gone, relieve the world of this suburban boy, the mass and measure surely of a nagging burden as body and name. He failed and here are these words.

∞

May 8, 2016

Wheels

Some winter day and month 1978
This memory is a smear: metal, sky, rain, road spray, lane dividers submerged, dashboard, wipers rubbing on glass, some destination, some path, some task worn opaque by decades.
This is my last memory of mom able to drive before Multiple Sclerosis took her body to her bed like an island and its shore. She holds the brown wheel with confident grace forever (till my end) here. Her hair is long and she is tuning the radio, the great big knobs between her fingers, spinning like the wheels and time.
I am a little boy in the back seat here, submerged by window glass, high seats and all that rain. It is an aquarium in reverse. This memory, this lightning in the meat inside my skull paralleling the bolts in that storm long dead to vapor and rain again, cities and states away then to die another death in atmosphere, it holds her in that car long crushed to a cube, her grace and kindness beyond her body later to lose voice then be a brief cloud of scattered ash. It rains here. She smiles as I turn in this memory and the road is paper then water then holes then just road and fade. I turn forward again now and near smell her perfume, touch her shoulder, tell her of my love and gratitude as her son. The rain drives on.

∞

March 19, 2016

Ηarbor

One night 1985
Her arms are forever here, her hair celestial, her voice the wind outside through the canyons, up the hills, along the deserts. My stereo plays The Byrds and early R.E.M here/there/this island within. She says something and the words now are worn stones in water, a warmth where once was sound, something of atoms and past.
I turn now in this memory and my old room is missing a wall, stars pour across closet to great nothing and everything of cosmos and memory at once. A comet alights now where surely once was a shirt on a hanger, a distant point of light glimmers where surely was a jacket for the rains. This moment is a first love distilled down to touch and that warm shelter harbor of youth now held within.

Pool

Some summer day 1990
Mom sits near the pool here, this once, this forever till my end. She sits in her wheelchair in this vault of once afternoon, this airless sky mottled and raw with passing of time, by the waters now impossible hues of blue, synaptic confetti splashes along an edge. She has big sunglasses on in the sun now held in a few photographs and this memory. The cars out front are all sold or crushed away in the earth, the conversation has long belched skyward and away. The boy I was here is a stranger to me now, a lifetime away, tethered by shared cells, shared eyes, I miss him now in these odd times, I mourn him at times in this middle age.
She sits by the pool forever here, alive, vibrant, a slight grin despite her advancing Multiple Sclerosis that years later will take such and moments and then her away. We will scatter her ashes on a hilltop some here far off and unborn day. Here she sits by the pool.

∞

January 30, 2016

Open
Oct/Nov 1993 San Francisco
The sky is devoid of math here, free of wind and cloud and physics (until I pass on), is unemcumbered by atoms and molecules and logic of living days; this is a space open robin’s egg blue infinite. I am 22 here. An English major at San Francisco State. The world ahead of blank pages, sketch lines, guesses, blooms dark to bright as yet even in view. I have long dead epiphany in this moment now in a kind of mental amber, something or words and water. This other me furiously scribbles in smeary pen here while walking in impossible sky to earth, infinite trumping finite for a moment. I turn now in this memory and buildings hurry to form, to fill in the non essential of such a moment, epiphany young is not of stores or the smoke behind that bus needed to later get home. Here is sky open all.

∞

January 6, 2016

All is water

1977 some month and day
All is water. Sky, land, breath, movement, street, lawn, doorway..all are rain and flood from grey to opaque to thin oatmeal mud brown. Walls and lines and faces all fade into shades, shadow, gradations and ghosts. The storm came in the morning with high thin clouds and wind then lightning veins across the flesh of sky, a skin of portent and impending flood to break the bonds of cloud and air.
I am a small boy forever here. Hair a blonde bowl cut. I surely to others was another shadow in the sheets of falling water. I would many years later learn it was an El Nino year and storm, a breath hot from atmosphere and ocean, of something breaking, of water drifting east below boats, birds or nobody at all. The school was geometry in the waterfalls, was a ghost brick to metal all around, an opaque obtuse sense of space as the clouds gutted themselves above to torrent and death against the eastern hills.
I turn now in this memory and holes appear, a street with houses surely from some television show. All is water and the boy that died into my later years.

∞

December 6, 2015

Waves

1976 some summer day

We are children forever here. This high cloud speckled sky is endless. A summer afternoon is cooling into evening as we run yard to yard playing tag. I turn east in this aging memory and house and sky and fence and grass splinter into spectrum, doors and windows almost unsuturing out of what was alley and next street. This is running, running, giddy, dinner soon hunger tempered innocent joys, of north to south across a street. I see now the face of a boy once a neighbor and dear friend and it is a cloud, a cumulus of past running alongside me here/there. All is lawns and open spaces and a joy we thought was forever. I turn now and can almost see my mother waving in the window , her smile, her long hair, her strong hands waving to come in for dinner, her loving warm eyes dots in this past, suns in the room of past. She has long left this earth and that house is a distant stranger broken into the pale geometry of a hundred old photos but we run and she waves here.

∞

October 13, 2015

Just dancing
1997, some month

The world is an invisible collapse, some odd dark internal ballast, a perpetual floor sure to fall cavern away, roof sure to blast limp and pale into the night and to nothing. This is a party at Cal Arts. A Thursday night. A blur of voices, hot stale air, beer, music and my sure unmooring from Earth to a gnat swarm of atoms , a dull erasure from inside out.
I turn now in this withering hall flicker of memory and the walls undulate, bend and curl. The front doors seem to rush in like teeth of a hungry mouth. The ceiling has tiles, now an impossible skylight to beautiful stars pinned paper on deep space, now a hole molded over, now nothing, now as it likely was, dull in precise detail. I am a broken satellite here/there/now/past just as this memory is adrift amongst the past and the thin tether in my aging brain.
The insecurities rage in gales here. The self doubts are waterfalls, dam collapses, hills sliding down in rain; surely the rest of the crowd is just dancing.

Fog
1989 some summer month and day

Grandma becomes fog here. Compton. Her stairs. A conversation now wiped to quiet and an open mouth. She has plants beside her still. They are tomatoes now, vines, flowers. She is fog, a kind of time as sun evaporation. In this place in memory she is near mist, dots of her curls of hair, warm eyes, pantsuit, standing on the stone steps surely long torn down.
This memory is between others between others between others…the sinew between muscles past bones of past to present. She is fog here. Her kitchen forever (until my end) holds half finished sandwiches, patterned tiles, a faucet still dripping broken from time. I hold this fog close, as long as it remains, it undulates now with something of her, of that past she was still alive.

∞

September 15, 2015

Moon

1992/3 some day and month

The world is wind here..endless gusts and sand. This windy night a deep low passes to the north of San Francisco and my dorm room mate takes us for a drive to explore. The night in this memory is total, an erasure, a darkness of eons and vaults of nothing, an impossible erasure of stars, racing clouds, cars, shore, distant homes and all else as though unborn. He turns and says something to me then/now but his mouth is a bloom of nothing, a cave of silence, his face a faint glow in a generic hooded sweatshirt as sand surely was flying at us full ballast almost to spark like tiny collision lightning in the air. I turn now west in this eroding island of warm memory and the sea is gone, ocean and waves to flat black fused to that nothing sky. All is his smile and the bond of friendship emerging from the math of forms sending not at all what I expected to live a year with me in a tiny room on the shoulder of a sprawling campus. He is a glow moving north here as I turn back now, a gentle moon light cloud of face amongst it all then flickering into the nothing of past.

Outside
1976 some day and month

My mom sits staring out the front window forever here (“here”). Her eyes are calm and peaceful orbs staring at some point in this space as she sits by a potted plant and half read book that now has no cover image or name. Her mouth is Mona Lisa content as whatever internal thought and its little synaptic film is now the thing inside the insect gracefully held in so much amber. She is relaxed and a fan turns a wind now near 40 years vintage beside her in her earth tone blouse and pants. It is an honor almost to visit here now and a wonder outside space and time to see her at such peace. May this memory last forever…the forever at least that exists until I too leave this earth and this life.

∞

August 18, 2015

Trees

Some now falsely lit summer day 1984

Dad is coming soon in a fake wood paneled station wagon, the secret back seat a turret by spare tire and at times aging fast food wrappers and an odd kind of swamp water brackish and from who knows where and when. This is a backyard. A party. There is music here but is now rotted out to near silence in memory. There is a false gauzy light in recall now, surely an alien intrusion from old 70’s photos and something of the melancholy and possibility trapped in synaptic amber here. Two chances at a first kiss. Both missed by colossal shyness, the collapsing internal of self at this age, this far off ugly island of youth. I was sure I was better off invisible this whole day, sure that a human fog would be a richer presence. I wanted at times to shoot into a billion pieces, break the bonds of body, place and even gravity just to not be sure of being a walking sunken ship, wreckage in a shirt and pants. I turn now in this memory and the sky rattles clouds and storm then sun then a hundred impossible trees, a happy obscuring, a beneficial something else. Dad will come soon and honk loud that horn. I will leave and tell myself for many years it was a disappointment, the chance to be good, to be able to tell stories of promise and hope, of moving forward in this awkward time in life; the truth is they surely were never to kiss that boy I was, it was a joke or would have been left stillborn in the trees as my shyness again turned inward and pushed life “safely” away.

I turn again now in this space in memory and trees, trees, they eat the view.

∞

August 2, 2015

She sits up

Some day and month 2004 2005

She sits up here. My aunt. Hospice. The last 2 days she was eyes closed muttering to her mother, my long dead grandmother and others, as though she had 2 toes at least already over to the other side. She was speaking to ghosts like a Christmas party/reunion beyond the pale while we all sat like distant islands in the small room.

She tells stories, sips water, laughs at the jello portion, is my aunt I knew as a child, artist, firebrand, well of humor. The room is gasping and breathing somehow in incompletion and memory here, a kind of throat as floor and walls and machines, mouth an impossible door wall sized now, surely something specific eaten by the moths, ants and rats of time.

I turn in this memory space now and look east to windows changing shapes like a menagerie of eyes blinking away bright then fade; a bathroom emerges in great detail now but it is from my mother’s room before she was taken from this life. I turn upward in this memory now and for a second see birds, flocks, gangly, awkward across a storm lashed sky, then just ceiling.

She sits up here forever,vibrant. A day later she will be dead.

∞

July 12, 2015

The Grass is Green

Some day and month 1987
High school. Senior year. I am detritus here. Adrift. A fog of flesh. A vapor with zits. The memory is smeared and worn and near gutted. The buildings cut in and out of nothing as does a generic robin blue sky with clouds generic as to flicker away. I hated myself here. Marveled that a single soul would talk to me.
It is the walk to 4th period across the grass. The lawn here in this gutless flab of memory, this pathetic shard of past is impossibly vibrant amongst almost total erasure. I wanted to die every day here, every step, every tick of time when this place was an enforced enclosure of days 5 days a week. There is the sound of a tardy bell slithering around the ruins here, snaking through a barely there bit of that building like it moves through broken teeth. I turn now in this memory and building shudder and shiver in and out being, odd stand ins , fast food places, a church, a bit of Harvard as only seen on You Tube; my mind is struggling to spine in logic where the younger me tried to kill this place in recall, bleed it away, this wound and scab of a dead self of 16. I turn forward again now, walking the stops of that teen me who was convinced he was Nosferatu in a Flock of Seagulls haircut, a leper without colony, a human stain, a pit of failure. The grass is green. All else is dying here.

∞

June 15, 2015

She Tells me Stories

Some day and hour 1977
She whispers me stories here. Her voice is now the gelatinous clear shapes cuneiform…the letters she shuttled from her hospital bed to mine. The chemo ward is dark forever, a menagerie of hall lights appear and vanish on the periphery, their glow carved away by time. She whispers to me here. I had that mystery condition, was at Stanford for tests, mom simply picked me up for ice cream, 24 hours and tests and nothing but soup and bread. There were no more beds. The chemo ward had friends , sweet kids my age but she once held my hand. Her hair smelled like ice cream. Her eyes was gentle. The rows of metal edged hospital beds in this place in memory are almost bird cages now, then lines above checkered floor, then nothing. She a few years later passed away, the letter sent with stamps postmarked with a city I can no longer recall, again time carves away.

She tells me stories here.

The City is a Fire

Some day and late hour 1993
My legs become iron here, my feet become stone. The loft for a second has stone walls then bricks then exploded view out across the geometry of lights of a night in San Francisco here. This memory is of that first art party and of things falling apart. I taught myself in middle school to walk again, to minimize that limp that got bullies a gift to hurl back in hurricanes of insults for so long. That cadence fails here, nerves turning feet to brick like that imagined wall, legs to cement. There is someone I want to talk to somewhere here, their body is now a million black bird wings, a shuddering shadow by an impossible punch bowl and beer kegs. The window bows out again now across the city; it is veined with street lights and sky and tail lights, fires impossible in view. The music has dried away to a crust of detuned guitar here in this hall of memory, now silence as the crowd open and close silent mouths. I am paralyzed by insecurity literally as I was that night as the city is a fire of distant ends far from “here”.

∞

April 6, 2015

Trees

1988 some summer day
We walk in forests here. The trees arc and bend with the fade of memory into an odd sort of living tunnel as impossible as it shot by the ink of recall and synapse fade. The light “here” is that insect held in amber, a fossil in the goop of some past. She turns to me at this point and says something that at the time seemed impossibly poignant, a kind of forever, a dried husk of an internal thought chalk dust appears now…something of holding onto this moment and her words….it is a tunnel of another kind slowly dying here in this memory. She turns to me and my other friend at the time is no longer behind. He is now a human shadow in time, that swarm of insects that has no name. Time has no mercy. I turn in this memory back and he is a flurry of movement and he is nothing. Surely I am now the same to him all these years since we last spoke if even an atom of recall at all. I turn forward again now in this fading former now. The trees seem fainter ahead.

∞

February 22, 2015

Cloud

2003-2004..some day Mom becomes a cloud here. This day in memory is full of dull dark clouds, surely not there then, a manifestation of loss, something almost tangible in the synapses of mourning. My brother hurls her ashes and for an instant they hold like a swarm of bees, like a hand waving goodbye. Then it breaks. The cliff in this memory shifts color and height, such things matter little here. She fought Multiple Sclerosis for so many years. She spoke when she lost her voice by pointing at letters. She went from cane, to metal cane, to three prong walker, to wheelchair to bed. She became paralyzed on one side. She still was that tough gentle genius that drove that station wagon. Then it won. The machines gurgled and then one day stopped. But for one moment after she became a cloud, a goodbye, a last embrace in ash in the air on the edge of a hill.

∞

January 17, 2015

Flesh

1998 some month and day measure

I am in a room at Cal Arts here. Watching a film. The room now has only walls and a few faces have been wiped clean by the years. One former friend shines like marble in baggy clothes here, hairless, faceless, near gone. I am nearing graduation in this odd swamp of erasure and geometry. It was like being a plane lifting away from ground but as a body, seeing forms not comfort, familiarity breaking like ice cubes away. It was a wave of random terror that holds some ballast and tether amongst the mundanity and day to day so long washed away here, it was a rogue wave and realizing this soon will be memory, ghost flesh of such.

A faceless former friend turns now in this memory and asks a question of which now there is no sound.

∞

January 17, 2015

Island

1985/6/ christmas morning

Mom is sitting watching us open presents forever here. She sits on the couch long now methane by the glass doors long only dream flesh, her hair changing lengths above her sweet loving eyes. The presents are impossibly wrapped in shifting colors and patterns and little bows born of a bored synapse, little glimmering intruders in this island of past.
She sits by her cane that would have been from a few years before, the carved wood some elegant metaphor of her now, thus it remains. I turn in this memory and its confluence of trajectories, its odd menageries of molecules , minutea and the tides of times and their toll on the abstract shore of past makes a window briefly glisten with honey flooding sun then move it across a wall and close. She sits here, her content face is at peace here, her very cheek the true island among storm and tide and time.

∞

December 8, 2014

I Want to Swim

Some summer afternoon 1983-4-5

My mother sits in a chair here. In this past. She has her wooden cane comfortably beside her. The sky is a jar of honey warm sun here. Her sisters also long now passed away chat comfortably with paper plates full of cheese and crackers and pasta salad almost visceral even now. The grave is a distant thought to many at this backyard gathering. It will soon enough pluck some in the edges of this memory like a cruel bird in such sun and sky of this past, this film of recall, other plates to be full of similar snacks after ceremonies and dark processions. But this all will come in unseen futures from “here” and “Now”. My mother smiles now in this memory as I turn back and the sky tries to form trees, houses, a fence that may have been wood to splinter or never born in this world at all. The warm sun pours over all here like water. This place in memory brings some kind of sanctuary. May I not forget it until that as yet unborn day and its molecules and sky and salads as I pass away; I want to swim heartily in this memory, watch my mom here with that smile in the old photographs.

Teeth

1992 some month and day

I am going to get a snack now in my memory. 22 years ago now, the same bundle of years as the me here/there in the S.f State dorm now a broken satellite of memory and past. The near pencil sketch is a year’s composite of my roomie from Houston Texas. Here he is a vague form under a pile of impossible blankets with patterns shifting as I write and try to recall. His vcr is almost shaped like an anthill now, worn away, smoothed by so much life and forgetting. My desk in this memory just moved across the tiny room. The door is a cave opening, an open mouth to nothing, now a wood grain and door knob to a hall. I am moving to open the door in this place that stranger of me in the past called home. I turn and look to the window and there are storms flying past at great speed, rain against nothing where once was glass. The hall again is nothing, a few stones and soil, broken teeth of cement where the carpet was in this eroding past. Someday this will be a building torn down, someday I will become so much past tucked into the soil, soon this period of my life will be memories drained of all color like some kind of light turned off. I turn back to the door now and the walls have exploded out in all directions to shadow and sleepers in impossible walless rooms and beds. Time has teeth. The past bears the marks here in recall.

∞

October, 18, 2014

Periphery

1986 some summer day designation

My dad rides around with my uncle here forever until these eyes close, until this synapse theater cave
closes and rides into soil. They drive around Morro bay here, shirts changing infinite patterns.colors and geometry on white fabric of some kind while their nostalgia puts in tapes of bands of their teens and twenties , the ghost of a young me is a swarm of beach sand and atoms somewhere in the backseat which in recall now is but a blank space ever color shifting, a black hole, the whole memory untethered, as though at any second to blow apart into some exploded view or into a moment of past blown into forms held by unseen tiny strings, some odd barely functioning musculature of fading recall. I did not understand nostalgia then. I,the locust swarm of molecules here was a boy. I now peer into this nearly self immolating moment with music playing of those days seeping into this place, imposter, intruder, I am all of these things as is this present now peering in some interior telescape to another’s past almost, their nostalgia ride, a near ruin now of my periphery of this, as surely they have such a torn bio-chemical filmstrip dying slowly in them as well at this moment. Theirs being of looking back, mine of the edge of misunderstanding, both of that boy here not knowing yet of past unmooring away, and of this middle age losing that boy piece by piece, ever farther away, maybe someday to blow like a peacock wing display away into a thousand bits then nothing as I age.

I turn now in this memory and there is no rear window, it is sutured shut to black blank sky nothing, but one bit of a setting sun seeps in impossible yet golden bright.

∞

October, 11, 2014

May There be Windows

1983 some summer month and day

We are on vacation here, forever, at least until the hall of synapses, the rocks memory is hurled against in a thousand shards , until these hands rest folded in the grave, until these eyes of some middle age shut , suture and away, vacation at the ocean, of so much froth, of snacks, coolers, sleep and boxed cereal and the novelty of portable radio, so much light, so much ballast, here/there it is.

Mom sleeps next to dad here, her hair long like the branches of trees back by the railroad tracks my brother and I as little boys would explore in quiet sun warmed afternoon hours. I am up in the upper bunk next to my brother (the space now surely would not fit one of us, the space surely is long to rust or crushed to the final architecture of a metal square or ripped and gutted to parts, hopefully maybe a door knob or window still of some vacation somewhere ).

I turn now in this memory and there is a window, light on waves flickering of night and day, of sand, then rocks, of the ocean as a mouth then a bright moon lit cloud (there was no window). Memory and time have carved metal, born glass. Mom sleeps here, years from the world taking her away. Dad sleeps by the tiny stove, knobs now shifted a hundred colors. We are on vacation here, may this memory hold as I age before I am wiped from this earth, may there be windows, real or imagined. I turn again and mom is at peace, impossible waves reflect the time unhinged moon on their glistening backs , so much music on a shore.

It Is

1994 some summer night

A party in San Francisco. A swirl now of light and vague synth sounds, a cacophony of scents and shapes, walls undulating slightly out of missing data and this being a memory dull as unsweetened oatmeal. A once close friend is surely amongst the shapes here/there, it was her party, she said she wanted to stay 24 forever. She has no face here, no one does, nor bodies even, time has near worn this room in memory clean. A window now appears, morosely lit by candles , it is impossibly ornate, some odd congealed blob of all the high cielings of 4 years living in that/this city. It is a stranger now, the city, this apartment, these people now devoid of bodies down to so much fabric in air as time passes ever onward. I turn in this hollowed memory and see her bracelet, it gleams briefly then it too is lost in the murk.

∞

September 13, 2014

He Had a Card

1997 some day in fall

There is an invisible split in the sky here, a fissure, deep and gaping and nothing at all. First year of graduate school at Cal Arts and empty cathedrals of air out a window in a messy room, placement in something so deeply tangible from the campus wide to the very wood of the door but atoms could grow fly wings here, molecules betraying into valley, chasm. There is confusion tangled in the dirty laundry in the corner of the floor still here after all these years. That stranger once of these eyes, these hands , he moldered here, he rotted a bit in the quiet times between classes and no one knew. He contemplated black dark things here of future , self and all the rest. He felt sure to at any moment un-moor, gravity to let go, him to blow apart into a billion filaments then nothing, away. He at the same time felt some tether toward something to just maybe come beyond all this, maybe, maybe. I turn now in this aging memory and room and the closet flickers and flashes wood grain, hangers and books, nothing, then a range of impossible colors , the ceiling is white then grey, then something like a lid of a pill jar, then an open gaping mouth to a low hanging rain burdened sky, upside down black turrets and cold blasts of air , some sort of ghost breath here, then nothing and a pregnant tense calm. The desk seems to almost have teeth as the details fade but that fear and hope hangs in this cavern of past thick, confused, but holding the walls up as the years turn ever away. That young boy died over the following years, he had a card with my name.

Mom Flickers Again

1983 some month and day

We are in ruins here. My brother disappears in this moment of past in great piles of wood and rocks brought up by the great storm. The el nino birthed a beast of vapor near hawaii the slices in time before this morning or was it early afternoon. My mom is still alive here,she wavers and flickers in the car up the road. Dad is a jumble of lines and air straight through out with his voice saying “Damon , hurry up” …time is moths and has eaten away so much detail as it does. The pile is clear though, some odd island of my childhood attention left undamaged from time’s greater storm. My brother soon will emerge with a blue bellied lizard in his hand, my dad scared of possible poison, the breeze to pick up from the ocean and its angry waves and oatmeal post storm sky. For now all is a pile of driftwood and what I would later learn were bits of houses decapitated by the same ocean now impotent post rage and gale. Mom flickers again and vanishes.

∞

August 8, 2014

Never Came to Bloom

Some day and time 1997 It is mud here. Rocks. A few plants inserted by the years. I am in grad school at Cal Arts. My room mates are a kind of family. All seems forever here/there, this now mottled aging “now”. The huge rains are a kind of comfort,the clouds hanging low , making this place on the edge of campus part of a sort of terrarium of art school. I look up now in this derelict satellite and the sky is paper, cardboard, holes, then rain, an odd heavy rain not reaching the ground now in memory. I walk a bit now and the campus flashes and flitters almost uneasily, a sort of twitch. I felt at this moment the comfort of being tucked in as a baby, all was in progress, in place it seemed. The clouds now are absurd calligraphy swirls, victorian somehow. I turn in this static memory now and look east and for a second there is only void, a black to grey gradation then a faint ghost of the valley and distant hills. The family soon split apart. Most of us now are strangers again as though this period never formed , never came to bloom out of so much mathematics, miles and trajectories. I look up now and the heavy rain hangs from Dr Suess like clouds to just above my head in this moment slowly eroding away in time like so much nameless hillside.

∞

July 27, 2014

The Driver is an Absence

1988 1989 some day long dead and away The desert is dust, choked white blue sky, distant thunderstorms, joshua trees and this road, this now never, forever, everything nothing road here. The car shudders blue to red to green, it is metal and glass ghost, inconsequential, engineless phantom with that guy I once remembered at the wheel. His front passenger said we would be friends forever, she is eyeless here. Her name I barely recall after so many years, it remains etched somewhere in that yearbook with that now obtuse seeming artifact page long, phone number and all. I roll down the window here and the passing cactus and Joshua Trees change from academic like the dull drawings in old text books to these living things some ten feet out of reach so vivid in this reverberation, this synapse dry river droplet of recall. She turns to me now to tell me that thing that once was a shared memory…silence now as her eyeless mouthless face, a stone of flesh has black hair flapping around in some inserted by failed detail breeze, an intruder in this wreck, this ruin. The radio plays that song we said would be forever now. All I hear is one note of a keyboard then the window rolling up, those Joshua trees dying away from once immediacy to behind the windowglass. The driver is an absence, nothing at all at the wheel.

∞

May 26, 2014

The Story Lingers

1995 some day and month
There is a beach here. There is no beach here. This thin peninsula of sand and stars is the one night that we all went out after work. “We” …sand in water….dissolved now to erasures, some complete….a crowd of that job, that place, that other time, that other me exploded like stars into this one. We worked at a group home with autistic kids. This was the glue, that situational bond so real that snaps when the time comes. I look up “here” and the stars are impossible shimmers, legion, a trillion eyes of light looking downward at the waves and shore. One autistic boy tried to catch the moon in bushes during the day; matt catch moon! he would shout with both confidence and hope. He carried a little net from a fish tank, swore he would be its friend, feed it milk, said it slept during the day in bushes to rest up for night. We share this story here lit by a fire that likely never was, a shared joy of the 12 hour Saturday work day now a fading jar of stories, free floating details and the distance time holds in its belly, longer than miles. I turn and look back and there are faces in that false fires, one I still remember and who remembers me. The rest are ghosts. The billion eyes above blink, a wave crashes to nothing. The story lingers in the air here forever of that sweet boy and the lives we briefly intersected. The beach shivers in a wave as though it knows its fate in future years to wipe ever further away along with that moon.

∞

April 20, 2014

Roar

1997 some month and day designation
I walk across Cal Arts here. There is the roar of a party in the distance the way of flames.
The odd 70’s stone waffle forms pass above still, now mottled, rotten like teeth in places, in slow motion blur impossibly in distant recall.
The bird swarm flurry of doctors by the still faces of many now long passed relatives, paintings here long and silent with wash of activity before their odd gallery. This menagerie is a few houses of memory before… the crowd grows louder… in this night long past noise will make me forget…. now in age and its line, death stands quaint in that roar.

∞

March 22, 2014

I am Still Here

Crowd is a wash of forms and colors and those plastic chairs. I am still here, atoms holding steady.

Forever

Some day 1977
We run forever in semi dark hallways here; our feet almost lift above the tiles. This place is of those off hours with us past the open windows and shade trees dropping leaves, past the carts with half eaten lunches, past the rooms and halls now long mental moth eaten clear away. He runs ahead of me with a smile now so essential here, so omnipresent as to almost shine perfect teeth looking back at me with a face a thin small circular balloon. Sometimes we stopped at the room with basic video games hidden away for some experiment or to trawl out when things got really dicy for some kid. I treasure this space in time and memory most of all as he was the brother of my first almost love. Second grade. Too young to know what any really means here/there but she was kind, sweet, would have had blonde hair if not for the chemo. All the kids had no hair like her, in recall the room of them numbers ten, 20, a thousand a crowd of kids sadly I have washed clean in memory around her.
They did the tests on me in this place: shock with the big dial and wires all over me like a spider full of lightning strikes, the needle that took the waters out of my spine, the numbers drawn on me as I first heard my body and life and that mystery in me at birth that sent me “here”, my I.Q part of the odd bag of numbers that made me, this ghost of a boy in second grade.
She later died. Her brother years later fell out of a truck a letter read.
We run here, her brother and I, a wind of two…a joyous breeze of feet on ugly tile patterns. Forever.

∞

February 16, 2014

But That Odd Sky

2003 some month and day designation

An old mattress was given to me 3 years before, 60’s vintage, poverty led me to accept the kind gift. It opened up a tag while I slept and old bacteria near 40 years in growing led me here. I am near death here, the universe a hospital bed and its metal peninsula edge. My heart is swollen against my ribs here like some angry crustacean jailed in the once me. The fever broke and then pains came; raging, angry ever tightening within like the body wanted revenge for some wrong. The nurses are nervous 50 feet from here, they don’t want a young corpse on their shift. Time and past is so fog dense and yet glass opaque at times, there is both solace and wicked cruelty in this. I turn around in this odd composite memory and the walls are blankets with data scrawled on them trembling, almost shuddering and breathing weakly all around. The ceiling is black sky and stars, an impossibilty, the whole building in memory falling away to the black permanence of night and those distant lights. The monitors dug into my arm are absent here. Their immediacy, the math of self, life and death, they have rotten away in a decade, away. But that odd sky, that hope of things beyond blinking like a million eyes, that dark shadow of one’s end, it lingers, permeates all in those hall of memory even as my body has long fully recovered. Memory holds both the shadow and the ember beyond the chiseled architecture of time and temperatures and days.

Weight and Motors

1998 may/june

The motor turns inside the painting here that is a video I shot in the desert and a forever broken prose poem of the boy, tractor and impotent clouds and sky. I have slept 3 hours total in 2 days here, this day I find out if I have graduated Cal Arts or not, this blurry sleep edge encrusted place of a wall by a staircase, of the two years to this moment, the nightmares of falling down hillside made of the books of dead semioticians and art catalogs, of swimming joyously in warm rains with it all behind. The edges of the main gallery at Cal Arts are a smeared sort of peanut butter of time and space now, the way dull white holds all the colors of the spectrum of prism, the way of layers moving at once in some sort of soup within these once walls here, “here” a tiny island in all contexts, a flash of color in the once hall, the exhaustion still palpable, my body a weight, my mind a drunk near asleep, the two profs debating the color black, one seeing the burnt dystopic apocalypse of some grim future, the other seeing aesthetic choice and frame as the motor runs. The future is born on the simple spin of the ball in that last shot in a tie game, here it is of their words and the empty halls 360 in all directions blank to fill somehow from this once physical here.

∞

January 20, 2014

Island

1995 may/june

I am graduating here. It is finally happening after 7 years and two schools and two cities. The image is an impossible bee’s eye view of a sea of caps and gowns, of the campus, of my grandma from Compton sitting in a floppy hat in a bit of shade; it is the bee’s eye view from bad old movies, composite, multiples. There is a stage here surely from the crumbs and brain toe jam of a dozen college films from my youth up till now; it is blue, now grey, now red. The heat is real though in this unreality shot from synapses, this confetti of a long dead afternoon and its dermis of incomplete detail. It is hot, summer hot from L.A up here in San Francisco (here being of course an adrift island of the city long shed , peeled away by days and hours), a sweaty wet heat, a swamp alive in the petri dish of otherwise dry recall.

I see my grandmother with such grace in her polyester suit, such gentle poems in that flower in her pocket here, it changes now through a catalog of possible blooms, but the general space remains alive in this place. She will pass away a few years from here, that fall in that tiled bathroom, that end of her days, but here she sits in a folding chair in a corner of it all, a gentle bloom herself despite the lost specificity of that damn flower. My mom is home, unable to make it, but she is here..everywhere…forever….in each chair, blade of impossible grass and vague sky. She too will pass in a few years but a few architectures in space and time from here I bought her the SFSU mom sweatshirt, saw here wear it beaming wordless in the island of her bed and medicines. That is a sun here from afar.

Today I am graduating. Today is forever here. The sea of caps and gowns shivers in unison in the heat now like a thousand bats, like a crowd of black birds. Soon I will cross that stage.

Of Her

1994 ..some day and month pinned to this

I am sitting here by a small stream in a park. A friend is sitting next to me in red lipstick and doc martens. She and I are doing homework sprawled out on the grass of this corner of Golden Gate park in this day with the sky painted bright sun and a thin single line of cloud. She years later will go away to school in Arizona while I move back to Los Angeles to Cal Arts. She will date boys, I will have a few tempests of chaos of almost girlfriends from here, invisible lines drawn in atoms from this spot of grass, so much cold measure of moments and things shot from this spot like some mutant powers of ten outward. She will always marry that tall boy in Arizona, I will fall for the tragic future doctor with a blue streak in her hair. She will later fall into a deep depression as will I. She and I will age years and miles from here, stumble along oddly parallel planes for a time as well. She later will become my room mate , now my soul mate and wife. She at this moment is reading a book like that afternoon transposed here from that afternoon. Another line. For now in this memory I sit and read beside this interesting new classmate and friend in that forever sun. I turn in the memory and its park by that water and fluttering bird wing movements are the crowd of others once sharing this afternoon now all of her. My love.

∞

January 12, 2014

A Cloud

A holiday 2012
My grandmother rolls in her wheelchair with a grace beyond words or time here. Her bracelets rattle a gentle chime as she listens amidst the din, that audio storm that is a crowd. This was some holiday, that glue, that odd cartography of conversations, of the spaces for a few hours interlaced of words and breath, of some space in time before it all again splits apart. She sits here forever grinning, listening, waiting to tell a story of a book she is reading. She has since been tucked like a seed into the soil , has since become a cloud and then lifted beyond the bonds of sky and earth. She forever here is music, a grin and listening amongst the din , 98 and a vessel of wisdom and grace. I turn and all the walls point as stairs outward and up then flash to wallpaper.

Caverns

1994 some month and day
I see caverns here. They are in the wooden chairs, in the banister, in the drying spilled beer of the campus pub, they are in the air somehow now. Little broken doors and chasms in the very dust mote stink vacuum where oxygen once was that invisible lake around things. This is the underground part of the student union at San Francisco State. This is also nothing at all. This is the undevelop polaroid skin and the heap of bits of the times spent here (then all long gone, seeped from the cavern inside this skull). A blur passes flashes a range of colors like a ravaged color wheel beaten into near opacity; it may be a friend once meeting me for lunch here some day then, it may be a dozen such things, it may be the people I was too shy to get to know, it may be a glitch in recall or nothing at all. I turn here and the walls flash posters surely from coffee shops across the city, then wood panels from some film I cannot name, then blank walls. The downstairs is almost gutted like a carcass here in this “now” (already moldering into yet another “then”). A fluttering sickly geometry is all that remains of the 2 staircases, it is dying here. The ceiling seems to sink, slump, almost reek with the deep sadness of nearing graduation, of the new city now old, of that odd turn becoming a narrative slumping toward its inevitable end. Someone asks me my major, their face a fluttering bird wing of a hundred eyes, mouths, noses, then a shallow cave in a sweater and away. Nostalgia has no key here. This is a slice in time of ends, not beginnings, of the space in the building not the windows once flashing sunlight so bare and new.
This crumb of memory is afterthoughts and incompletion, of the space before ends, the gasp of the cavern’s mouth and little more.

∞

December 29, 2013