Float

The music doesn’t seem so loud until you walk away from it, from the vibrations of the crowd, pulsating with smoke.

Your pupils don’t seem so wide until you look into the eyes of the girl standing next to you in line for the portable toilets. She’s beautiful and warm and then she says hi and wants to talk and just know, how are you?

Time stretches and on the mind are basic things: water, fun, deep breaths, where are my friends? Who are my friends? Who am I? Who will I be?

What came first, life or the soundtrack?

Oakland is the ish.

Oakland is the ish.
It gets YOU, it gets ME, and it still doesn’t give a damn that you don’t get IT.
It keeps it real around the edges, and sometimes, it blasts a rough image ‘cuz it can.
It’s got real diversity, not just twenty-year-old techies tryna find themselves, but hey — they’re welcome, too.
Here, it’s all bout fukxing with ish, with shit, with it.
You could stay beyond the water, but you’ll miss out.
‘Cuz we got Uptown, Downtown, Old Town, and Chinatown all chilling out and inviting you into that real vibrant shit.
and it’s the ish.

A Marvelous Way To Be Human

And subtly tangled amongst this swarming, vicious, viscous sea of monstrous absurdity and violent sensuality was the very weirdest sight of them all: that the one most main-stream, pure, prudent emotion splurted from every act. Each tit-whipping, butt-wiping, smutt-liking, dick-pricking, mickey-humping, leash-dragging, clit-piercing, rub-taunting, hot-screaming interaction melted pain and sex together in the alchemist’s brutal cauldron; and there is dark magic and there is light magic and the difference is the spoon used to stir; and at folsom street that spoon was made of acceptance and truth and affection and love.

Truth by Claudia Leger

There is no escape; only endurance

Panicked but continuing with daily routine

Seeking peace but loading ammo

The planes, the bombs, the death

Will life continue for the crying babe

Struggle to feed, to work, to learn, to teach

The madness swirls, the world watches

An old woman peeks from her curtain

Tattered and crippled she limps to the curb

Alms workers dive into the rubbish

The old woman is drawn down with them

Alarms, sirens, screams, cursing and prayers

Mingled together, mistaken for normal

Pride and anger stretch mentality to unknown limits

Questions unvoiced, answers never expected.

Comic Books

You could tell summer was going to be over soon. It was only six o’clock and the sun was geting low in the sky.
She took a drag of the cigarette. It was half-smoked when she started it.
“Don’t you like comic books?” he asked.
“I like the ones where the women are wearing heels,” she said.
He put his hand on her upper thigh. Intimate, but needy. She brushed it off as if it were a tiresome fly that had lost its way around a plate of french fries.
He sighed and fidgeted with the ring on his finger.

 

Rock

It’s a story about a photographer whose house gets robbed, and then all his work ends up for sale on the black market, and he can’t afford to buy back any of his own work.

They sell art on the black market?

I don’t know. But it’s a beautiful story, you know, lots of metaphor in there.

Why didn’t he just make new copies?

Because his photos were single edition, all of them.

But the robbers took them.

Yeah.

Couldn’t he, like, cancel those ones and do reprints?

No, he said it would break his artistic integrity.

No shit?

Yeah.

This Is Why

Dylan had a can of black spray paint pointed at his eyes.

“Hey! Dylan! Stop! Put that down!” His mom ran out of the house screaming, the baby tossed over her shoulder. “Dylan!”

Dylan pointed it up and sent a balloon of smoky mist into the air.

His mom tore the can from him as particles of paint settled onto their shoulders. “You can’t do that,” she said.

Dylan poked at the baby’s bare feet.

“You cannot just come out here and play with stuff like that. This is dangerous. OK? It’s not going to come out of your clothes.”