"there is no such thing as a fresh start in life; the best you can do is use gesso."

welcome home, welcome to a new home. today i took a long walk along the ocean (nope, lake), the tide out and rippling the curtains against the snow. yes, it's finally snowing; i've been giddy about it all day, despite the temperature drop, and it looks so crinkly falling through branches and orbs, a thin coat in the alleyway out back, an application of freshsheet. i've been pleased with my new roommate, and the heat inside, and friends who have been visiting and taking me to parties or out for a beer or out for pizza and a whole pantheon of fuzzy. i've been less than pleased with the quality of my teacherly instincts (ah sweet panic), and less than pleased with my writerly outpoorings, and less than pleased by the distraction of my brain brooding sullenly and ungraciously on a couple (no more) of snotty snottisms. funny how the fresh snow indicts the land beneath it.

but also outlines the shape if not the substance of our landscapes. i have been sharp on the knowledge of my own worth and capacity, i have been sharp on the way language can be used as a barrier, and how that might not have been its initial function. did we build words to say "no" or were words built to give name? as a prosthetic extention to bridging capacity: to define into a pigeonhole. and does language translate? and if every translation is ultimate failure, where is the joy we feel located? because every interaction is imprecise, to say the least, but perhaps it is the imprecision and disconnect in every word and bodyword that allows for freedom, and every freedom owns the potential for alone to equate lonely or alone to equate next-to. i have been finding pleasure in the space between speech and understanding.

and i've also been angry at the ways analysis of that space can misalign. i've been eating my own brains like oatmeal; this is the shame i feel for ever thinking i knew what you were thinking. this is the shame i shake with my finger for you ever thinking you knew what i was thinking.

you was once a banned personal pronoun, and now it simply means: whomsoever has tilted ears or an indecipherable face.

hmph, i'm making no sense.

i put up my curtain rod last night and slipped the satin cover over its naked limb. but i forgot to draw it and woke with construction workers flickering through the windows of the building next door. not staring at me, and perhaps not even noticing me, but i think tonight i will stretch out the red fabric as a temporary and revirgining screen. maybe i will light a candle too.