AWAD

So, you're supposed to write one song a day for some amount of time.  6 months, or a year or something.  After you do that, there is an album that got born.  Or so the lore would suggest.  I'm not really working in days.  I mean, a day consists of two sometimes.  Sometimes one or none.  Time is tricky for me that way.

I know I have to do this everyday.  So I'll tell a story.  Maybe I'll have more to say because of it.

The first time I ever ate stuffed grape leaves, they were served warm in an Egyptian restaurant in Chicago.  There were four or six of them and the sauce they were served in was the color of fluorescent green in neon signs.  It was oily and I'll never forget how it tasted.  I was with my cousin, Meg.  She always knows about the most delicious things.

I bought some in a can day before yesterday.  Dolmas.  They are a far cry from the first ones i tasted the first time.  They are still almost good.  I wish you could can a day.  I wish you could can a fleeting thing, the color of the hair of the girl on the bus in front of you, the second when your headache lifts off.  There could be cans with big X's on them, when you found out someone you love was going to die, no doubt, for sure.  Or when you got the call that someone you love had died.  I think all the time is in cans, for me.  Looser lids on some.  I can't remember the way it seems like a person should.  Little things open the cans.  The color of the sky.  The way the food tastes, the harmonics in this song or that.  A song, itself.

I'm stuffed and pickled.  I have to make a web around this halo of time.
I have to make a cage so I have some bars to count.
I have to make the colors of before come here and live and dance and breathe, they should be incorporated.
They should be fundamental.

I have to keep stringing words together on lines and not be so scared.

If you don't like it, don't read it.

Pickled Onions

Today is the day I start pickling fish.  I have an extra lime and I am putting shrimp in it with some vinegar and spicy pepper.  It's for tacos.  Yesterday was creole stuffed peppers.  I started to like to cook again, which is a relief.  Everything is starting to move back into me.  Music is wrapping me up instead of suffocating me.  I cleaned the bathroom and sang Billie Holiday songs.  Just like me.  Today will be coffee and tacos and work and I can.  Then I'm going to try to figure out how to make borscht.  Maybe some more pickled fish.  On Friday I am going to take a thermos of lemonade to the beach and read a book.  No reason not to feel good sometimes.  Also tomorrow, there will be more to say.

Sluts named something

When I was little, there were people around all the time.  It wasn't very quiet, between the people who were always around and the people I stayed with. Now when I'm alone and it's quiet, I hate that.  Mostly I let the radio fill up the air, but if the water is running, I will sing.  I don't even think it's much like singing and what's more, It's tonal recitation.  I see people cut their own way along.  I think I can do that.  Then I fall apart and fall around and fall with feet in the river, fall with feet tucked under the fender. \\



For Julian Today.  It's all I got in me.