anywhere all the way

we went sub-atomic, we astral projected, the old thunder was back again. it rumbled beneath, it frightened the children. your fingers and hair pulsed as a signal, electric and endless, silk and yarn born as vines in the jungle. we went down, we pushed deep, there were promises made brand new again.

we played basketball with our spirit animals against egyptian gods, shirts versus skins, scales against fur. we launched ourselves against the rim and you slam dunked the sun's edge where it shattered. there was shared power, there were strong steps to move against. in the glowing center of the galaxy i poured a forty for all the dead stars in the night sky and to a universe still expanding. you raced the wind, you saw the sights. the ghosts of your grandchildren waved from other timelines and all the ways the world could be but were not reached out across the distance. we left them behind.

i swam too far and my heart stopped, for three whole minutes in the clear glacial void it stopped completely. the voice that reached me there was a mother's patient tone and i rose half-dreaming but lucid. you drew a map of your body, its cult of cells, the hidden valleys and the secrets you keep, where x marks old worlds unchanging. the air was hot so we conjured cold milk from a silver horn and the magic that rolled our minds onward, the fantasy of living, the gift of awareness, it felt closer. an end was unquestionable, our spent lives tarnished gems in the ancient lodestone walls. we found no fear in the knowing. we pressed on, we shot straight. there was honesty in our answers.

-blh 2009
echo park

bird flu

sitting on a bench across the street from the convention center, he struggled with a sandwich too large and unwieldy for his small mouth and skinny fingers. he was embarrassed by the process of trying to eat it, pieces of mustard-covered lettuce and bits of cheese dropping defiantly from the two slices of bread. he shrugged apologetically to a passing car as a wet slice of tomato hit the sidewalk between his feet. the truth was that no one was looking at him and nobody cared much about his mess at all, but it felt better to pretend like he was noticed enough to need to explain himself.

he smiled knowingly at an old mexican woman passing by, all but oblivious to him. "sorry about the sidewalk" he offered, wiping crumbs from his cheek with a paper napkin. the old woman continued without response or interest.

the convention center was a "memorial sports arena", and that he had no idea who or what it was in memory of troubled him. anymore even the names and labels of things lacked a hint of proper meaning and the absence of care or explanation was beginning to get old. but he had reached the age (perhaps a little late) where he realized that not every story had a point or the satisfaction of an ending, and this included the account of his own life. the world around him swelled with cruel possibility constantly, always resolving itself at the end of each day as another series of suddenly obvious fabrications: the ghost of the abandoned carnival was simply the property owner dressed in white linen; the phantom howl of the haunted mines was of course only the chance sound of a breeze blowing over glass bottles, amplified through old machines. truthfully, the mysteries didn’t hold much hope anymore.

a transit bus rolled past, full of people all silent in their seats, staring out at the city around them. the sun was fully risen overhead and the cool air that the wind pushed through his hair did little to relieve him of the heat. he checked his watch and realized he had lost track of time again. he was already late for his return from lunch, and his stomach turned with the realization. he would have explaining to do, none of it useful or desired. he found it vaguely remarkable that one with so little to account for was able to let even the simplest tasks slip by.

grating with annoyance, he let the rest of the sandwich fall from between his fingers to the ground. he regretted purchasing it, sorry for rewarding himself for accomplishing so little. the remains of his lunch looked misplaced and pathetic immediately from its new home below. he sighed, and rubbed the palms of his hands against his closed eyes until he saw flashes of light. when his vision faded back in, several pigeons had gathered near his feet, shy and anxious lives moving towards the ruin of food he had created. one of the birds hopped closest to him awkwardly and he noticed it somehow only had one leg. it seemed brave only as a consequence of having little else to lose. the bird pecked at a piece of lettuce, almost tumbling over with the effort.

he suddenly felt like crying. another bird hopped up from the gutter, a broken wing hanging uselessly at its side. it picked up some food in its beak and looked up at him blankly. where had these awful things come from, he thought. how could they live like this? it seemed impossible that something merciful had not already come along to finish off what misfortune had begun. the birds cooed quietly without justification before him and shuffled amongst themselves. unable to help, unable to return in time to his job, he sat instead. he sat and watched the lame birds peck at his latest mistake and it was a long time before he had the strength to stand up from the bench again. he shut his eyes and tried to envision new shapes unbound by the hard weight of experience, spirits untouched by rough hands out in the world.

-blh 2008
los angeles memorial sports arena

breathing vapor

a faithless echo from the rib set in my father's side

hungry yet uncertain, a clueless infant mouth to feed
i travel, foggy shape through empty blocks of big city nothing
there are places here your family warned you about
worse yet the things they never thought of
but you can escape them as a ghost
here i am no threat, i have no gun to fire
i'm not worth the pull of your arrow in bow
watch my dirty hands reach for what they don't get
lighting fires in the street to remember paths before
sorry about the mess, it's a problem and i know this but
i've been up all night, working hard on ways to love you
searching for the trick that makes an old house feel like home.



-blh/2008

game over

they are fitting your bones into slots
presized holes to fit your deconstruction
sliding like children's blocks into correctly shaped
voids.

their masks are slipping, murky teeth behind those smiles
but they are mindless of it, because they have you
right where they want you
and they want you to see.

we pray for escape plans, a hopeful way to turn our tails and run
but this is a glass box above our heads
the blinding glare of the sun a merciless hammer
each blow trapping the lid down tight.

and there is no where to go, because we are unsound
and unfit in our own bodies.
there is not a way to feel comfortable again.
we barely know ourselves, we scarely remember
who we thought ourselves to be.



i can't write anymore, save for letters
save for signing my name on checks for bills.
my fingers, once trusted and nimble
are now the claws on the end of monstrous limbs.
my hands crash on the keystrokes
cudgels breaking teeth in a dumb face without satisfaction.

they sold us with cheap colors, and clever photography.
living now in the sights of countless postcards, the truth is ready.
on every bus stop and overpass
on the grafitti crawling through industry
on the wedding veils
hooked on razor wire
lining the train lots and broken amphitheaters
the words are spelled out with unrivaled clarity:

you are not going to make it. you were never going to make it.

we have leapt to stupid, foolish deaths
and there is no longer surprise to soften the blow.
our hearts beat dumbly within heavy chests
our last gasps soft and whisper still
all gone unnoticed.
and the old lies stay afloat
buoyed once more and ready
rising each grisly crest onto an endless tide of youth.

-blh/2008

when dinosaurs ruled the earth

you think things are bad now, cut back 80 million years ago and realize that los angeles was underwater. visualize those warm inland seas covering your favorite restaurant and your favorite places to shop and you start to see that things could be worse.

your dirty apartment now, those roaches who don't even pretend to be afraid of you these days; looking blankly at you from pots and pans and the mirror of the bathroom sink? go back in time and problems escalate. their giant insect relatives, buzzing in the hot, oxygen thick air of prehistory, they'd only make you feel worse. welcome to a life where the best you can hope for is a flow of tree sap to trap your worries in stasis for a few eons.

little differences between now and then, constrasting moments in time. a drunken friend threatening to kill himself on hollywood boulevard. a pteranodon stretching its wings over what will one day be kansas. my shirtless neighbor, only 5 or 6, showing off a glowing skull he got at the dollar store. hadrosaurs nesting among the murky grasses of a swamp in ancient asia. a room mate drives off to denver, all remaining hope ahead of him and it's like how animals have always run towards the things important to them, or away from what scared them, and you see how things tend to repeat themselves.

example: tar pits formed near miracle mile at some point, and a mastodon fell in, and attracted predators from miles who then got stuck, one after another, dying to get that easy meal. later, 9 million bc, all those dire wolves and sabertooth tigers are long dead, but a native american woman ends up a fossil in the same tar pits, her mistakes guiding her to that familiar result. there are lessons to be learned here, but they're predictably lost under all that sucking oil. can you think of an original gesture anymore? is anyone learning anything?

the wind blows fires across the city, and it blows trees apart and it blows a haunted house that took two weeks to build into pieces and the whole world used to be a single continent and look what happened to it. if things are bad now with the weather and the earthquakes and your broken heart, what were they back then? dust from an asteroid blocked out the sun and froze everything but today its just that girl you like and maybe things could be a lot worse but does it matter? what did a cave man's problems ever mean to you? nothing's relevant, but it's all relative, and maybe another ice age is just what you need this year to get your life together, for us to get things started and stop doing less than the bugs in the living room.

and somewhere down the line, in a futurist's dream, the bugs are still there, their slow cell cycles surviving in the radiation that wiped people away forever, and there are new problems just like the old problems and at best you hope that within all of this someone's figured something out and maybe life will at least be less melodramatic for the bugs than it was for us or dinosaurs or wooly mammoths or even those cave men; painting the shapes of their hands on rock walls, their lives summed up in drawings of simple figures holding spears and torches and running after things that were important to them.



-blh/2007

here there is no bedtime

and the bad kids stay out late.
set loose in open fields like recovered injured wildlife,
always running away from, never toward or to.
a voice message on my parent's answering machine at 4 am full of terror,
"sorry i never called, you were right about the living room."

combing the coast for signs of life,
drawn to beach house brush fires like winged bugs in a dark night.
these cities are mostly flammable, Malibu to Silverlake,
country club to your uncle's condo.
bet his life savings on a beachfront property
and watch the tide take the ashes away.
the ten o'clock news is just fire, fire, fire.



forgetting the map on a mountain highway, we can't find the way on our own.
twisting and turning in a hungry spiral that takes us
through hills too high to see the shore,
no demarcation 'til dawn cracks the eastern ridge and
we remember we have a home.
trudging through the front door too tired, no one taking off their shoes.
a ritual to keep the floors clean,
a losing battle to pretend there's something here to own.
the roof we paid to rent is a sword to swing at strangeness,
but there's no shield
because there's no heat
and the pilot light is missing.

bad kids go wherever they want and stay up way too late.
babies turn from breast milk too young, declaring "i am tired of this taste."

-blh 2007

cabin pressure

halfway to my destination in the window seat of an airplane; the businessman in the seat next to me with his red face in his wet hands, the ache in the back of my throat, and the moment where I remember that I hate flying and that 13,000 miles off the ground is a terrible place to be reminded.

the plane jerks and bobs on the turbulence outside, and i focus on the glossy surface of safety cards that will offer no real solution to any problem at all. in the event of a water landing, the safety door to my right will pop loose and a giant orange slide the color of day-glo hunting vests will inflate, the duty of emergency exit escort falling onto my shoulders. in such an event responsibilities will be low, however, because I'll be as dead as the rest of the passengers. the surface tension of the ocean will compact our plane flat, and we'll be a sheet of folded notebook paper laid out across the rolling waves. the explosion didn't kill the astronauts on the Challenger flight so much as their cockpit's freefall drop onto the water below them, so i put the safety card back in the seat pocket and think about something else.

and i'm trying really hard to not think about you, to avoid awarding you the satisfaction of more wasted moments on your behalf. but the businessman in the seat next to me is still crying, like he's been doing since ten minutes after takeoff. buttoned up in his suit, papers laid out on the tray table in front of him, his composure broke and suddenly it was tears and snot and these heavy racking sobs of his that shake my seat with every convulsion of his body. the stewardess is asking him, is he going to be okay, does he need a bottle of water, would he like something to eat, and its clear that what he needs is not ever going to be in the kitchen of this plane. so they leave him there, and i'm looking hard out the window and there's an entire skyline of empty space to fall into. i think how when the oxygen masks drop from overhead, the man next to me won't even care, those masks and his laptop and his expensive leather briefcase just more meaningless objects in the world.

its your fault. me here, him sobbing, the wind slapping this plane around like unwanted garbage. even the plane's fall into a range of mountains somewhere within wyoming would only be the closing statement to your most recent line of arguments. here is a smirking demise for the source of your troubles, scattered in unrecognizable pieces across empty prairies, an exclamation point at the end of another useless sentence. if the crash brought my death i'd want to haunt you, but the concept is beginning to feel redundant. those nature videos where the giant predatory snake waits for the antelope to breathe out so it can tighten its grip, pushing itself inward until there's nowhere left for air to go, that's this moment. a thousand weighted coils draped around my tired chest.

the businessman finally silent next to me, his grief exhausting him to sleep, the plane begins its descent. my safety card folded up in the seat, i can still see the faces on all the cartoon passengers, calm and stoic amidst their situations. mothers checking the seat belts on their children, passengers adjusting the face masks of the people sitting next to them, they know they're all in this together. i close my eyes and try hard to feel like they do and I wait for the impact.

-blh/oct. 2006

fist of the pacific

the city I thought I would love opened up on a sky dark with human ashes and I told myself I couldn't go back.

some endless weeks before, we walked through a forest, you and I, our hands clasped, our fingers crisscrossed like firm fabric stitches. the ground was soft and damp and here it seemed that any life could be brought up from the soil, that endless aeons of trees and vines and predatory flytraps could be born again and again in the promise of the good earth. here was a land unremoved from its spirits, and although scattered, the native people would always be able to lean out on the wind and find a familiar whisper, waiting to return. I wanted a whole new level of authenticity. I wished for a bloodline born on the nearest shore a thousand years ago, generations of things still sacred leading up to my life where it stood. my hands got cold from all the places they'd never been, so I squeezed them against yours.

a crime wave was on the news in the city, masked men with guns pointed at denny's patrons, their money new property of desperate living. leaning over a hotel balcony, i could see the low horizon, and the absence of anything on it made the world feel too big, too fast. lonely palms reached towards each other across impossible spaces, and I took a breath of hot dirty air and knew this would define anyone caught in it too long. it was a city of ghosts still living, a vastness too old and steady for me to ever really comprehend.

grassy plains stretched out along the roads that I grew up on, and fog rolled through mountains I'd met at birth. the familiarity was wearing me down, until the landscape shifted just slightly and showed me something I hadn't seen recently, a subtle change of scenery so reassuring that I wondered where I was for a moment. I had trained my eyes not to rest too long on these hometown sights from the fear that I would not be able to turn away; that what you once belonged to owned you always and would one day come to reclaim. But I looked, and the rain and the peaks and the prisms of light told me that while there were a million ways to be unhappy, there were still more secrets to seek. there was new living to be done on distant coasts as young flesh ought to find.

-blh/2006

A True Account Of Our Fictional Trip To Mexico

You called me at 11:14, the phone's ring interrupting an episode of Elimidate I was watching with the sound turned halfway down. I put down the can of pineapple I was eating with a fork and picked up your call, your voice electric and steady over the static. "We're going to Mexico", you told me, and we'd leave tomorrow by car. More information being unnecessary, not bothering to sit up fully in my chair, I told you that would be fine and your reply was an enthusiastic "awesome" followed by the click of the dial tone. I dropped the receiver to the floor and turned the TV on mute. I supposed it was time to get some clothes together.

Some hours later, we were in a hot car on a highway which advocated getting lost across every inch of the south. Your stuff, my stuff, it was all together in the back seat, a wash of cool cotton and soon to be neglected swimwear. You were driving, and I was reading a brochure from the car rental place on how not to drink or eat the wrong things in Mexico and totally throw up my guts and die. You talked loudly over the sound of our open windows, telling me how just once you'd like to cruise across an international border with all the wrong stuff in your suitcase. You wanted to have a trunk full of fruit and produce, and a backseat full of rare species of wildlife. Yes, you actually did have full plans to visit all the regional farms at your destination and frankly, you were hoping to carry back armloads of tobacco and alcohol for all your American friends. The customs guards would stop your car, and their dogs would bark at your glove box full of exotic papayas, and you'd smile with quiet pride as you explained for the next two hours that you were just a naive grad student researching a thesis on transcontinental agricultural trends.

Days were already gone to our trip, you mingling with locals in broken Spanish, me in each new town's bar drinking whatever was cheapest that promised not to kill me outright. The sights were largely non-revelatory; the ruins still ruined, the ocean tugging on the shore, the tourists and souvenirs legion. You and I, we talked theoretically of some piece of Mexico that had never seen the naked breasts of a hundred college co-eds. Together we pondered a section of land that had not ONCE felt the touch of Mardi Gras beads in its sand.

"Somewhere there is danger", you told me, your eyes full with the light of religious candles. "Somewhere down here, you step out of your house and breathe the air and it tells you that you should not be there." I suggested that there were plenty of landfills that could offer the same, but we both knew that I understood. Miles away, organs were being stolen from sleeping bodies, and in dirt basements beneath wooden floors, roosters and dogs and men were fighting each other, all breath and instinct and life. There were places here where men and women sipped liquor from chilled glasses in dark limos, and white powder was poured out across antique wood tables in the chapels of old missions. People like you and me, we could stumble into such things and die mysterious deaths, our bodies never touching native soil again.

"You could disappear in a country like this" you told me, but in your words I saw glass cases in museums, our bones propped up like fresh archaeology. There were feathers in our skulls, stone axes in our hands, and an understated educational font above us reading simply: American Tourists. We'd educate children on class trips for years to come.

There was a point at the end of our trip where I was depressed, where we were watching the sun go down on some nameless beach, drinking what felt like authentic booze in some cantina we'd never see again. We'd been down here on a whim, two people brave or stupid enough to just get up from a chair and head in a direction for the sake of all the miles behind us. I still felt the same, the sun would not set differently, and we were still going to die. A waitress offered us some fresh lime and I asked her to marry me in English, but she just refilled my glass. You were saying how maybe we could just keep heading down into South America, we could keep moving and moving and never look back. You were young, and I was drunk, the sun above us so red and round, a mouthful of blood in a sky on fire.


-blh/2006

Honeybee, You're Killing Me

You're born from an unfertilized egg. You hatch, a larvae, and your older sisters began to feed you royal jelly from their heads for your first few days of life. They cut you off immediately, because you of all the brood will certainly never grow to become a queen. You're a drone, and even upon your birth your caretakers sense your limited worth within the hive. Still, knowing what lies ahead for you, they continue to feed you nectar, diluted honey, and pollen as the milk of your childhood until at last, you cocoon. As you make your change, you dream about your mother, somewhere within the hive. Distant and unmindful of you, she's laying more eggs from the sperm of your father, dead somewhere, and that of a handful of other mates.

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You wake up with wings. Around you, the nest buzzes with the movement of tens of thousands of workers. Your sterile sisters, that worker/warrior caste, continue to keep the hive alive. They will feed you on demand throughout your life, you being unable to fulfill even that simplest of tasks. They move within their lives from tending the storage cells, to raising the young, and then taking to foraging in their old age. They toil until the muscles in their wings stop working, shutting down after a biological countdown, bound to one day leave them stranded and helpless on the ground during some random trip home from a final flower. They work until they die, but their lives are not yours. You're different, your genetics resolute in your life's one purpose.

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On some random afternoon, in the midst of Spring, you gather with your drone brothers away from the hive as you do daily. You lap up cool water from tiny droplets on the ground after a rainstorm, all of you a collective outsider within the hive. Each of you is your brother's competition, with only one one-hundredth of you ever bound to mate, but you are still united in your long waiting for what is to come.

At night, as the hive sleeps, you regard your home. You were born without a stinger, and you will never have a chance to defend what is yours. If it were up to you, the colony might be ripped apart by unkind hands, the defenseless young spilling out into the dark, already starving from your lack of care. A chill runs through you, and you shiver in the night. Around you, your drone brothers shiver too, joining the other thousands of workers who are already doing the same. The heat from all your bodies warms the hive, and you fall asleep, united with your kind as one life in the world.

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It's vicious war as the virgin queens emerge from their cells. They have a battle cry all their own, peeping a call of dominance to let each other know that there can be only one victor. They seek each other out and sting each other to death, crawling through the cells of the brood in a mad scramble to find each other first. They pull their still cocooned rivals from their pods, not showing one measure of mercy. You and your drone brothers leave the hive to its unpleasantness, and when you return that evening, there are only two queens left in the hive: the young virgin slayer of all rivals, and the old matriarch, your mother, still laying her eggs. When the time is right, when your mother has outlived her ability to rule, this young female will replace her. The workers will come to the old queen, one by one, until they have covered her completely, and they will gently smother her with their body heat, the subjects bearing away their old monarch with their love.

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Your time has come. At long last, the virgin queen is taking to her nuptial flights. You and the other males are ready to fulfill your one purpose. The queen is off, buzzing in the open air outside the hive. Your drone eyes, huge and now serving their true purpose of spotting the young queen in flight, take it all in. And you're off. No longer useless, no longer a weight on the heart of the hive, you buzz triumphantly after her, that savage virgin who murdered a dozen of her sisters for the chance she's offering to you right now. Rising past a wave of your brothers, you find her and catch her and at last serve the glorious point of your existence.

You merge with her, passing on the genetic code that has made you a champion above your fellow drones. Your seed will mix with that of the other mates she takes on before she settles to egg laying, assuring an even stronger future generation of brood. Your work complete, your barbed sex organ tears away from your body, like the stingers of your sisters, and your insides rush out of the sudden hole within you.

Sex is your doom, but you will never know the shame of those other drones who will be forced from the hive that winter, sentenced to freeze rather than act as a drain on the colony's toughest months. You die, and as it happens you think one last time of your mother, and how you have claimed her successor this day. Your death comes as your queen's will surely arrive; upon the warm dark of familiar wings.

-BLH/2006
Image: Mark L. Winston. 1987. The Biology of the Honey Bee