Ugh

...what's going on inside of my head...

..."I don't know" is an exit plan...

..."confused" is a pity-evoking-excuse...

..."friends" doesn't feel like friends...

...kissing will only make things better, not worse...

...things couldn't be worse...

...things couldn't be...

...things couldn't...

...things...

Vanishing Act

I've come to realize that I have made tremendous mistakes in my life, yet I have nearly done away with my past, and you keep yours. You keep yours around, because he's replaceable. You're not replaceable and you don't belong. Like a boomerang of filth, one returning into your hands, that I originally threw. I'm in no position to speak, so I'll suffer just the same. -For how long?
Long enough, just a few more nights, until next year, until winter passes, until I forget, until you forget. Place my eyes over his, my teeth in his gums, my lips over his flesh, my neck with his neck. Don't forget my nose. You're favorite place.
I'm feeling like a ghost, not of this world, like a newborn and I just
want you to look at me.

Swearing

I'd chew through your jaw
if it meant that I'd find out
the taste when you stuck your
tongue in his mouth. Did you
experience cold. I felt a shiver
stronger than stones falling down
a hill. It wasn't long after
until they sank in the muddy
pit, where you now lay your bones
- and where I now break mine.

-christopher uller

1,825

One-thousand, eight-hundred, twenty-five.
One-thousand, eight-hundred, twenty-five.
You burrowed yourself under blankets of
ember. I said goodbye, you said goodbye.
I burrowed myself in the Christmas light
brilliance. You said goodbye, I said goodbye.

-christopher uller

Comfortable & Home

"10 a. In a state of tranquil enjoyment and content; free from pain and trouble; at ease. (Usually, but not always, in reference to physical conditions or circumstances.)
b. Expressing or characterized by comfort; easy and tranquil; undisturbed; also colloq. of persons, suggestive of complacency, placidly self-satisfied."

"5. A place, region, or state to which one properly belongs, in which one's affections centre, or where one finds refuge, rest, or satisfaction."

-Oxford English Dictionary

Mistakes

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution's power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.

-Millay

Goodbye Southern California

Goodbye Southern California.
Gone for now feels like gone
forever.

Years Draining Through My Hands, Beads of Sand, Streaming

Paul Nicklen

Mildew

Sleep...
I'll come to
shape my
imagination
slowly.
Slowly pulled
over my
worry
&
faith,
in
you.

-Christopher Uller

November Misses My Weather

I recall him & I walking through the cozy sidewalks of Castro
at night. I couldn't tell it was dark though. Hot Cookie lights &
a purpled black "Q," pizza green bulbs & orange Walgreen lettering
illuminated my path. Distorted like vodka, glimpses drowned me in
a sea of bodies of men dressed in drag. Women in masks, Boba Fett,
& mummies with hard-ons littered my perception, but I made the
best of it. I'd no recollection of the effect of fragrance. With plastic
around my face I bruised the bottom of my eyeball; it's red now.
One spicy chicken sandwich, flat chested Russians posing for a photo,
& stockinged legs later, him & I made our way through the rapid
transit subway where the tired freaks slouched on concrete, while
their wigs unraveled down their chests. Exit 12th street & take the
800 route home. Telegraph shone brightly with fallen trees, and
leaves covering the ground. A cold return to our apartment, defrosted
windows, & there, upon the warmer sheets and blankets of my bed,
I crashed.

-Christopher Uller

Wine & Dine

So I just returned from a night of poetry, wine, and discussion with a few classmates and two current UC Berkeley Professors. One is a visiting Holloway Poet, and one is a Faculty Professor who is also a poet. Both are highly intelligent (no racial implications intended for those of you thinking like Giscombe) and both have written poetry that everyone should read. These two poets are important figures in these modern times of poetry and writing in general. Whereas one poet tries to deconstruct the essence of poetic structure by venturing into the realm of prose poetry, the others' "Prairie Style" poetry is nothing short of adventurous and eloquent in description. We spoke about many different subjects over wine, but one that looms ever so clearly in my mind was upon Folklore and racial jokes. Boundaries is the term that comes to mind when writing this. Social boundaries are important when discussing these types of topics and it comes to a point when one must cross those boundaries in order to understand a little more about who "other" people are. I use the term "other" to mean people that are not us; not the self. Perhaps a friend or even a family member. It's interesting to think about what makes racial, erotic, or gender specific jokes funny. It's even more interesting to think about faces and how one takes on the voice of another person in order to either make fun, or to condescend, or to just study and appreciate. Anyway, I'm going to get to some reading. Goodnight.

The Sky Opened Up & Started Pouring Rain

-I'm tired..
-Eyes are heavy, extended..
-"Is it in you now.."
-"Twisted up by knaves.."
-Yeah...
-Listening to music..
-Is it better to accept the truth that all have spoken..
-Merit your "real" through a badge..
-Show it off, clamp it on...
-"Before you put my body in the cold ground, take some time to warm it with your hands."

People Get Mugged Everywhere

Are you charmed by those words? Are you beguiled by the playful apparatus of suggestions? Signs and signifiers demonstrating whatever you'd like. I could write anything. Jot down a speculation about whether someone is completely insane or voluntarily that way.
Your smile persists to rise. Those teeth tell me everything. The way they bight down and chew on every syllable escaping from your throat. Note by note, your suspicions filled my senses and I thought about it long and hard. Cliche. Long and hard like the inside of a fourteen year old boy's mind at recess. Blacktop. Tether-ball. Hop-scotch; is for pussy-boys.
Don't you need it? Is it that fantastic, un-livable, without the overwhelming "Oh, so how is -?" Impressionism at it's best. There's an outfit for every week. Make them feel loved, allow your prints and knuckles to cascade beyond their belt, and squeeze those jeans girl. Tight squeeze by done-up nail clasping tips. The weather will change either way, and you'll refashion. You'll see. Meringue is the new scallop. As fishy as it sounds.

Christopher Uller

Words From Rilke

"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.
To love is good; too: love being difficult. For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation. For this reason young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know love: they have to learn it. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered close about their lonely, timid, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love. But learning-time is always a long, secluded time, and so loving, for a long while ahead and far on into life, is-solitude, intensified and deepened loneness for him who loves. Love is at first not anything that means merging, giving over, and uniting with another (for what would a union be of something unclarified and unfinished, still subordinate-?), it is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world for himself for another's sake, it is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things. Only in this sense, as the task of working at themselves ("the hearken and to hammer day and night"), might young people use the love that is given them. Merging and surrendering and every kind of communion is not for them (who must save and gather for a long, long time still) , is the ultimate, is perhaps that for which human lives as yet scarcely suffice.
But young people err so often and so grievously in this: that they (in whose nature it lies to have no patience) fling themselves at each other, when love takes possession of them, scatter themselves, just as they are, in all their untidiness, disorder, confusion... And then what? What is life to do to this heap of half-battered existence which they call their communion and which they would gladly call their happiness, if it were possible, and their future? Thus each loses himself for the sake of the other and loses the other and many others that wanted to still come. And loses the expanses and the possibilities, exchanges the approach and flight of gentle, diving things for an unfruitful perplexity out of which nothing can come any more, nothing save a little disgust, disillusionment and poverty, and rescue in one of the many conventions that have been put up in great number like public refuges along this most dangerous road. No realm of human experience is so well provided with conventions as this: life-preservers of most varied invention, boats and swimming-bladders are here; the social conception has managed to supply shelters of every sort, for, as it was disposed to take love-life as a pleasure, it had also to give it an easy form, cheap, safe and sure, as public pleasures are.
It is true that many young people who love wrongly, that is, simply with abandon and unsolitarily (the average will of course always go on doing so), feel the oppressiveness of a failure and want to make the situation in which they have landed viable and fruitful in their own personal way-; for their nature tells them that, less even than all else that is important, can questions of love be solved publicly and according to this or that agreement; that they are questions, intimate questions from one human being to another, which in any case demand a new, special, only personal answer-: but how should they who have already flung themselves together and no longer mark off and distinguish themselves from each other, who therefore no longer possess anything of their own selves, be able to find a way out of themselves, out of the depth of their already shattered solitude?
They act out of common helplessness, and then, if, with the best intentions, they try to avoid the convention that occurs to them (say, marriage), they land in the tentacles of some less loud, but equally deadly conventional solution; for then everything far around them is-convention; where people act out of a prematurely fused, turbid communion, every move is convention: every relation to which such entanglement leads has its convention, be it ever so unusual (that is, in the ordinary sense immoral); why, even separation would here be a conventional step, an impersonal chance to decision without strength and without fruit."

-Rainer Maria Rilke, "Letters To A Young Poet"

Used To

I’m crushing time into cubes of ice and sucking on their edges. Don’t worry about my enamel, cuz it’s grounded down, and grinding out the memories inside of my mind. Like a storage of untried cobwebs and festering mousetraps, my faculties of marbles and jacks collect and connect like hands on a clock, meeting across the rods of their bodies. Fleshly painted with matching tips and counting. Call me cab, I’m drowning in every alcoholic night filled with pestering dance and song. I can’t seem to get along. We don’t get along. Not like we used to... used to...

Summer Reading With a Slight Chance of Rain

Currently, I'm reading Faulkner, Nietzsche, Foucault, and Chabon for my "summer reading," but I think that I will venture out of my mind for awhile and enjoy comedy. Reading these books all of the time depresses me. Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying" is comedic at times, but the grisly mood that follows each character's dialogue overshadows the story with darkness. Every time I read it, I feel like I am in the southern part of the United States, where trees form the perimeter around a limitless field of tall grass, and it is raining all of the time, but not the drizzle rain, it's dark, heavy, gloomy rain. Rain accompanied by flashes of lightning that strike down in the distance. Far, but not too far. Loud, but not mind dwelling... anyways...

Hiking in Santa Monica Mountains this Thursday. It should be fun. Maybe I'll watch some cartoons in between now and then. Tom and Jerry, or Looney Tunes. I miss Animaniacs.

The Electric Dance Conspiracy

I climbed into the inconspicuous lavender gray caravan; it’s headlights peering into both eye’s iris. In the dashboard glow of the van’s interior, I fished the phone from my pocket and made a call. On the other end, the voice responded with news of distress. The driver and I thought about our face options: altruism, apathy, indifference, but then genuine concern rose into our cheeks. She turned the steering wheel to the east direction, then four blocks later, to the west direction where it stayed until the search and recovery team was assembled. One arose from sleep, the other from a shower, and the two originals, including myself, detoured from our quest, diverged onto a path full of flashing lights and raving sound.
I remember the pearl white lane changes and crimson brake lights that guided our fifty-five minute drive into the streets of downtown Los Angeles. The rest of the night went as follows.

-Sixteen year olds dressed down from dinner party attire.

-Carnival sounds, and blazing orange bulbs on spinning indigo saucers.

-A steel perforated gate and electric lime roadblock.

-The inside of an “open 24-hour,” International House of Pancakes.

-Valencia orange juice in a glass.

-Handprint bruises wrapped around our rescued companion’s neck.

-A lacquered black grand piano sitting in the lobby of a twelve-floor hotel.

-Fishnet stockings pulled up over thongs, and tucked under harlequin skirts.

-Stairs and an elevator, an elevator and stairs (semi-spiral).

-The frost-like charcoal eyeliner under a blonde’s eyes, her gilded locks falling just before her shoulders, elbows slightly bent into the cherry blossom pink dress that hung a foot above her knees. A bright yellow modish corset flowed from out of her dress near her hips and rested above her shoulder tops. Her translucent bubbly heels that looked like shoe molded out of boiling water rose with the giddiness of ten thousand school children on a first day of class.

-Her eyes catching my stare through the mirror.

-The drive home, completely dozed.

Masking the Unmasked

We sat bundled in the shirts on our backs, renouncing our premature return from a night of alcohol and thought. Headlights zigzagged behind us and we ducked into the marble darkness near the chilled muddy earth. Like a mould casted from the raw iron of heat and political distemper, we buried the lives of few shadow walkers under layers of psychological realism. What remained were ten page tributes to these figures’ motion based stereotypical lives. Their stories, sunk into my imagination much like a tattoo on the skin; deep, but mutable. In the cold frost of the air, I sat buckle-kneed waiting for a moment that would outlast my momentary sensuous pondering. Potentiality. The same feeling came to me in a Starbucks Coffee, while reading a Michael Chabon story about penning a superhero for cash. Metaphorically speaking, superheroes don’t have to save the day either. It’s a choice. A beneficial choice. Then, as soon as I put down the warm tea I thought to myself, “Why did I think of this?”

Christopher Uller

Colours

I do remember a few things. The lights changed from sapphire to magenta and the music pounded our ears. Cool tones from B flat arpeggios rocked our hips left and right, right and left, then back again. Amidst the fuss and static of it all, she grabbed my hip and detected our similarity. “White people” dancing is a sign of togetherness and supposedly made room for small talk. The blacks in my eyes dilated and the drink’s milky froth spilled over our shoes. L.A. Water. She asked if I was “religious” and I told her the truth. The loudness of it crossed my mind, but I couldn’t escape the flashlight and the debased floor mop. It grew hotter and hotter, until we left that floor. Outside and across the street showed the giant martini glass with a cadmium yellow underline. The stars hid from the night, and our group of seven walked through the alley and onto the asphalt. Our ride was waiting. On the seat in the van, my sweater laid. It was electric blue. Still is.

Christopher Uller

I Hadn't Recognized You There

The phone rattled and buzzed and broke out in song.
The woman seated next to me handwriting her crossword score turned and asked,
“Are you going to answer that?”

Christopher Uller

Living in a Cage

Each scratch at his back peels the cauterized skin up over itself. The flakes fall, lifelessly to the hardwood floor where they'll be swept up with lint, pubic fuzz, and deposits of God knows what. A man named Raj once told him that it wasn't good to write in the first person. He said nobody cared enough. Third person is confusing, but keeps readers at an "interested" distance. Away, far away from the involving mechanisms of the mind. The sense implied by "mind" suggests that it is a location rather than an object or device. Thinking as a pastime, or scratching as prosperity? The flakes continue to float. His “teres minor” experiences subtle throe just as the “humeri's head” clicks into place.
Females of sun soaken faces pondered at what had occurred. Why had his back gone completely red? No one could tell by the looks they had given. More importantly than not, his phone glowed when he smiled. Muck from the tube had laid in him, but the length of his palms were burning for blood. He woke up days after. His tee shirt stank of cigarettes and women. It didn’t quite pull over, but he saw through it.

Christopher Uller