The physics of Billiards eludes me every time.

How can a contradiction be also harmonious? And stilll...

(Like the acute injstice of all us people being utterly incapable of specific communication with most due to language barriers, juxtaposed with the inconceivable perfection of each language in its effortless distinction from any other.)

...I am so...

(Like the silly, encompassing boredom at the core of everything anyone ever thinks to say or do, and how fascinating the existence of this notion seems to be.)

...distracted...

(Like the debilitating self-doubt that can only accompany the approval of a stranger, when before your worth was never even considered.)

...by my own. I wish conceit wasn't a criterion for consciousness.

Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (12/30/05)

P.S. This morning an old Italian man blew a kiss to me when I passed him in my car, just because I smiled at him. Such things, such things.

Omigod!!! (Sorry.)

I've got a library book due today.

Okay so, get this. I was studying in front of a coffee shop (this is before the righteous torrents of rain had commenced) and a middle-aged homeless man hits me up for some company. Of course I oblige. He's wearing a Lakers hat after all (as if that means something to me) and a silver ring on his right middle finger of a lion's head with red eyes, and seeing how i'm rereading the Chronicles of Narnia these days...

So down he comes into the chair across from me. Suggestive remarks and empty compliments roll off his tongue as if his only available vocabulary, and the smell of cheap beer suddenly drenching me made this probably the case, but somewhere in between all that silliness he offered to recite some of his poetry. I accepted because at least he'd never broken eye contact.

I could barely hear what he was saying most of the time but his presence was something like mesmerizing. He'd periodically rise slowly and fall back into his chair or pound his fist on the table or switch between a low, almost-whisper to an angry growl, all the while his eyes remaining consistent with each momentary conviction. It was like there was an underlying poem even beneath his words, dictating these perfectly coordinated movements, as though he practiced for his reflection in some flawless mirror as it hung on the backside of a tired building in one of the alleys he claimed to be running away from. I told him he should perform live someplace; he told me i didn't even know.

By the end of those three poems there were some newly arrived cops lounging about that made my temporary companion nervous and defiant. Lapsing back into his former gibberish, but now louder and more obscene for the sake of his perceived audience, the last straw was when a super pretty girl walked by with her probably boyfriend and he shouted out something like, "WHO LET YOU OUTTA THE CAGE TONIGHT, BABY, WOOHOO!" (Yeah, it was bad, pure silliness the whole lot of it.) I think i laughed incredulously and said to him quietly, to defend against his sheer volume, "Man, you can't just say stuff like that." He was monumentally worked up by then and shouted out to no one that he could say whatever the goddamn fuck he wanted to, but then he sat back and whispered to me fervently that he'd bring me copies of all his poems if I wanted, and would I be here for another fifteen minutes?

Of course the cops got around to it right about then and started addressing my poet by his first name with all the condescension they could muster, saying things like, "Hey now James, why don't you come take a walk with us. I see you've got nice taste in the ladies but come on over here now. You know you're not wanted around here, so why do you keep coming back?" One thing's for sure, those two cops didn't meet my eyes once. I'm trying to make something of the comparison, but I don't really expect to.

Later one of the girls that worked in the coffee shop came out to apologize, but crazy James didn't come back with his poems.

Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (11/29/05)

Please, please, please steal my helmet!!! (And hey, take the jacket too.)

So yeah. My beautiful truck (no lie, a 1963 Ford F-250 flatbed, bright orange and everything) got totaled last weekend. ('Totaled?' 'Totalled?' Eh.) Some son of a bitch hit the poor thing as it sat, fuel pumpless, on the side of the road awaiting my return. Slammed the fucker into a Redwood. Oh, oh, oh, and then he disappeared so I'm just out the $850 towing bill, apparently.  Woe is me.

And then, and then, get this, my last mode of transportation is a motorcycle with a bald back tire which I'm driving 40 miles to and from school at least three times a week, right? So I'm working on getting a new tire and in the mean time driving carefully. Well YESTERDAY (cruelest of all days, indeed) I left my oh so heavy gear with my bike for point 2 seconds while I ran into the computer lab to print out a report due next class and when I got back it was all gone...just gone. Since it was already 3:30 and everybody closes at 6 around here, it meant I had to skip my last class (after turning in my report of course, fear not Darlings) in order to hike all the way down the mountain and into the city to find the closest bike shop selling helmets just so i could get back home...well, legally at least. Now i'm cruising around in Harley gear for no good reason at all, except that its dealership was only five miles away.

So there you have it. And all the while I'm just thrilled that occasionally something interesting happens. Bah.

Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (10/8/05)

Sure, sometimes trucks break for no reason and leave you stranded for nine hours, it's fine.

I'm tired of the pretenses.

w00t! I finally got the internet up in this God forsaken town. (Which is to say that I love it here, and so on and so forth.) This is a good thing because apparently 92% of my final grade depends upon whether or not I'm technologically advanced, Ancient History not excluded. Besides, who knows? Maybe I'll get lonely enough to log in to this place more than just occasionally. I hope not, that would ruin everything.

This crazy moth keeps running into my face. It's kinda nice.

So I'm lamenting the loss of a class today, but I don't know which. This is me, having to drop one. Isn't that so tragic, needing to choose which absence to suffer through? And of course you must choose something to mourn or else risk losing interest altogether. Anyway.

Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (9/30/05)

An ode to the iniquitous nature of blackberry brambles.

The last year or so and my time is not my own. Yet this is untrue, for the responsibilities I created for myself were always in the name of a distant desire. And this does approach presently.

Still I don't know what to do. I've worked so hard to be where I am now and yet I am here alone. I thought this was what I wanted. No, it is what I want, only it is more difficult than I could see.

Clearly spoken, I'm finally going to the school of my wish. I've worked and gone to school, duelly full-time, and my sacrifice of sleep, and friends, and time, and sometimes hope has found me here on the brink, accepted finally and grazing on the freedom of my own decisions.

Yet this is the next road of my life, and one that walks me away from the former where thereupon still float the most beloved of faces. Seeing them for the rest of my life has never been a question to me.

Thus far I'm too tired to consider the bartering of time spent or the necessity of patience. Here it's easier to dwell in the ambivalence that is the reward of experience.

Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (9/6/05)

...

Silver is just a coward's gray glittering with such conviction. A sparkle like hope that conceals its absence to give the surface its company. Love like magnificent's consequence litters the planes of my face, still, bleeding untruths with authority, breathless. Frequent expectation defied and souring the softest of mouths, which would speak cruelty casually and hypocrisy proud. If but one thing assures my belief, I speak words that must mean nothing.

...

Your hands tend to the unspoken for--their touch, an intrusion upon shame. With a voice descending the depths of disillusionment, still your hands return, having never learned the difference. Within the master's footsteps a servant is born, secreted in his obscene necessity. (If the pale light falters will you open your eyes, or have you always welcomed this belated invasion?) And do you know the conclusion of each joy will come? Impartially, and yet, inevitably. Will you withstand its arrival as ever it is anewed? So careless a celebration can destroy with discouraging ease, you may hardly notice at all. Cradle the fragments of that which you hold dear but relinquish at last the strength of their memory. Please. This life is but consequence of some unknown before and will dry the tears of tragedy. Except that we are not allowed an indulgence of life. Stiff in the threat of furtive glances we have placed our faith in the folly of hope and are fearless, already outdone by the surrounding haze. (The only standard deprived of conclusive worth, laid writhing now within such knowledge.) Freed to explore the limits of this injustice, we're confined by its conviction. But after the acceptance of deception hits us, determined or not, we'll have to fail.

...

We were naked so I wiped away your tears with my hair. If our spirits were trees we wouldn't falter so easily. Your eyes looked like tragedy when you confessed, “There is no beauty save the shadows of the clouds.” If the rain felt its descent only it would know my stagnant fear of a graceless existence, but it shows no sign. Your hands were beneath the snow until you lifted them to touch my face and let me feel the melting ice as it shrunk back from your fever, beaten. Your fingers are pensively restless, exuding desolation, and it's how I know: your faithlessness belongs to the willow's angel. I respond with silence and lay down, pulling you beside me. I kneel over you, your face a flinch away.  A darkness rests upon us while you shudder and I can't breathe, but you tell me not to worry as my sadness colored hair, drips.

...

Of all the ghosts I think I'm most alone. I'm ravenous for someone else's breath. My best friend thinks of her easy beauties, “Whatever, I fake it well.” It 's easier to believe her a liar. When I smile don't take it personally, I like the taste of my cracking lips for their ever pulling apart. Watching from afar my failing sight I can never stave off the cruel laughter, most loyal a mockery of hope spilling out my own mouth. I tell myself that there are things I need so as to give the waiting a purpose. Whatever, I'm good at faking it. My very faith makes me a liar, but how could I cry with what I know? If I weren't here alone before I am now. I whisper it to fall from my sleeplessness, sometimes, and it's still alright.

...

Gray noise of the folk, crazy bass sounding and the hum of humanity. Who would have thought? You're here now, with whomever you're here now with. But where will you go? And who would have thought? To the hum of humanity and other things I speak the end to stop the gray noise, and my head raises on accident. When my dwindling attention is caught with a sharpness I can't explain, I can see the sounds descend.

I advise you not to click on this button:

'Tis my first attempt at publication. It's very bad, let me assure you. I certainly wouldn't have bought a copy were I not the author. There are at least three pages with quite shameful typos. But hey, for a good idea of what not to do...

A Bright Sort of Dread & some poems.
Support independent publishing: buy this book on Lulu.

To be fair, my dog Sierra liked it when I read it to her. Though not so much as the Spanish dictionary I've spent many an hour reciting. I have nothing more to say for myself.

Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (12/2/06)