Strength

Back when I was still attending SFSU I had actually started to write a novel titled Strength. Every now and then I'll contract novelistic tendencies, but recently there is too much of everything happening at once, seemingly anyways. When I think of writing now I think I have a social services impulse, that at heart I am a Realist. But then when I write I become a Naturalist. It is all dreary at times, but only at times of dedicated writing timed out from my usual life of ferrying between Fairfield and Dixon. I still preserve between my ribs the hope to write the greatest work of art, but for now I have to recognize my other duties and joys. But also, I can spring unto you the introduction and bits of the aforementioned Strength, however embarrassing, the only two things allowing myself to alloy our agora being (1) you guys deserve more from me, and (2) an amateur is, after all, a lover, and I'm just sharing some love homies.

The streets, they are there. The rain dropping, their hand across the peak of this cemented hill, sweeping under the skirts of the beach’s violent child, the wind twined with another. There is a lot of green, that is trees, beneath the splotches of aura covering everything. Around the corner there were even new trees planted in brick-marked holes, separating the berths from the encompassing white, white rocks. Priuses, lime and yellow shelled, skitter atop the city’s skin, as if dice, rolling down the chute of Lawton until the arrival of their numbers. This will take awhile, and so until then I look up. There isn’t a sky seen, but it is likely there.
I live in the grid of San Francisco right above the university. In the Fall I had singled myself out of those I had once belonged to, and ended myself here. To leave, you must travel North along 1 and then East, because my apartment is West of where I came from, and I’m assuming those leaving would be those from my childhood, associates from that entire business. From the school you must take the Cow Palace exit, it is a hole of an exit and a tunnel of a turn.
There is no violence in nature today, only a virulent warmth like the ends of brooms in the winter—harsh hours outside, though the innards of the planted homes only better by their walls, a respite between them only temporary for the momentary stays. A television mumbles its signs through the gutters in my roof, which after consideration becomes the bottom of my landlord’s room, and what I take to be the kitchen. Even though piping is normally configured to merge between two stories—the kitchen on the first floor in the same position as the next—a delicious aroma often permeates from my bathroom. Do I shower so good when I don’t every other day? I know why it was named the Sunset District now.
It is barren and safe when the evening couches herself between every curb, congealing herself on panes with ready regards to inclination. When the streets are most quiet you can hear her, hush hush. Before the succession of the sun’s reign a forlorn hope stomps through the yards, construction workings, even, pat their palms of the subterranean earth upon their workpants, most deciding to leave their food-wrappings in their capped ditches. An hour of rush inseminates the city, broiling a soup of mucus-ridden cars in the hoary streets, eggs atop birches taken into even higher structures. An ant is driven over while another is fried, another tormented along its path by the anticipation of its mother’s ways. Before leaving the home of the world, the sun waves goodbye across Ocean View and Embarcadero with a simultaneity the span of a breath, and as the door closes behind mother moon’s entrance a rush of wind threatens the windows one last time. It is standard protocol says the warfare books behind me, making dusty outlines in their shelves, to create subsidiary waypoints, whether in gesture or material, in case resistance should be called in another time. But until then, there is often silence, such is the way my landlord decrees.
A threat, it could’ve been, the incidents today I think could have been threats. No, not to me, but to us, a waylay point for soldiers of curfew to poison our sewers and threaten our dangers, their black-and-white striped cars derailing the 29 but allowing the Metro a passing, nobody objecting though all the red the subject of scrutiny. The Book of Nature is supposed to be inside each of us, our considerations outside of the law self-evidence for the authority of the origin for everything artificial. Across from the campus there walks its student body, two dozen at a time, interfusing and unweaving in their crossing as the stoplights across each of their paths’ count down from a prefigured average. The ants surviving between the rails and the daises between one person and another, their Converse’s and Vans always between synapses.

At the time of a fall, and when in the premises of an other, the effect of intervention is expected. For instance, when the recycled cup of coffee made its usual sound of splashing, upon contact with the floor, its contents splattering the condiments bar and the socks of chairs, I was in the course of calling for caution of the oncoming coffee spoors. Simultaneously, to my right, a gasp was ejected as the woman took notice of the event, this action common as well with the man on my left, we three being on the outermost of the café peering in over glasses and assorted papers. These gasps, mine included, were genuine, and if time had allowed any one of us an increase in reflexes, the cup would never have caused a scene, that is, the scene would not have been necessary. Therein lies the human content, between gasps and notification, or at least warning, but perhaps even as warning. If anybody had been able to call the spill over the calculation of physics required to provide enough of a window to act in catching the falling artifact, then time would have been subjugated to the assurance of man and his society, or his sense of equilibrium, and the spill would not have existed. But yet, it has occurred, and this analysis has assured it so, and we go about our sidewalks and cafés, philosophizing further what it all means, as if chance, that extracted dryad, were as present as the thought of a perfect day, without the spilled coffee, and needed to be excluded. It has occurred, indeed, and this is all I can say, under the gesture of notification, a spilled cup of coffee, and I am on my own perfect little way, not as the message maker, but as the messenger.
To conclude, we will need a return, for I had forgotten a part of the whole story. I had thrown the cup. A stretch was being performed, the ribcage like a stereo projecting my life story in beats and pops. It was in the air as long and silent as I had glided my cotton arm beneath the tables and then straight through the matrix of their interstice, the style of thrust being like a shotput but with a yawning jerk at the wrist. Only the NASA-black security camera knows who had thrown it, and this awareness being only provisional to the extent that somebody may not have been behind its control.
Nobody was there, I knew this. The project was not to harm anybody, only to encourage a scene, to spin one out like a wheelwright.
I had to write, “Therein lies the human content, between gasps and notification, or at least warning, but perhaps even as warning.” But what did I mean? I want to say, perhaps, it is not what the statement can mean or even what I had intended it to mean, but rather what does the act of writing it and then questioning it mean, given the contexts of its explicit, contained claims and the contexts of its previous ground, the paragraph.
And meaning? When a machine says, “I love you,” it will have meant it, but at the same time, not have meant it, for it is a machine, just a machine, and nothing with emotions. I tell you this so I can hear it myself since it will only be you, my opposite, who I can trust with an honest equation. It should not surprise you to hear that I do not trust myself with any sort of high concepts, such as love in general, but this is only because I do not trust myself as an aggregate, or as a collective, or better yet, as a sea anemone with all its surroundings as part of its body, which reality ultimately demands each of her constituents to be. It should not surprise you both that I think my computer mouse tells me, “Hold me,” and that sometimes I do. I say it anyways, aloud, “I do.” I do, I do, I do.

for whatever god was left in the machine, and that had wanted to be known.

Only the trunk was bright with arson, opened and safe from further disaster, the flames engulfing its felt bottom and rusty lock system. It was a trammeled-grass green, the side design’s reliefs espousing lights in shades familiar only to a painter, and multiplied by the dance of heated oxygen in the space behind them, assuming a natural compass packaged with the design. The 29 took it as easy as usual in its rest before the last school corner, the elderly giving only a nod to the fire, a tip of their brims. It was only a bright day, the only casualty being the dry neck of Crayne, the Vietnamese driver. Of interest, however, is the attention paid by those with strong cameras in their phones in their pockets in their hands now. It’s kind of like that, I wanted to alleviate my neighbor’s savagery, but either it was not there, or he was not there, and so I just faced that burning oxygen storm and held unto my pockets, my back straight in its dry shirt.
“Oh my god, that car is on fire.”

These authors died. Every intersection is a book, and when the stars hold the sky there are crosses in some of the bosses, windows clipped in their white rainbows by clipped curtains.