22.06.019 Letter to and from Home

On the other side of the solstice.

I am in the sky again. I don't think of you like I used to, though of course I do still think of you dearly. This time, as the false progeny of my father's (now-deceased) father, I am traveling to Reno, to visit the cousin I've told you about. I will be buying land, hopefully before July is out-- I don't know how long the process takes once I've made my official offer.

I'll be leaving Chicago "permanently" (what is true permanence) at the end of August, on or around my birthday. Do you remember when my birthday is?

For the past day, I've been seeing Chicago in a new way, with the knowledge that I will be leaving. My eyes are open and my senses piqued.

I remember with fondness my family's last trip as a family unit in December 2007 and January 2008, when my sober mother made amends with the Matriarch who raised my father. We stayed in an Earthship.

That whole trip was colored by Bright Eyes' 2007 album "Cassadaga," a lush album from the usually-sparse Conor Oberst, and the first (to my knowledge) of his forays into folksy twang.

This trip: I've just discovered Oliver Peck, and his album "Pony" is playing in my ears (as gin/tonic plays in my circulatory system and brain) as I write this. He is a wonderful color-- I wonder what this trip will look like when I have enough distance to look back on it.

I am writing this letter for the sake of balance (it seems right to write something to you again while I'm displaced in the sky), and because my last few attempts at reaching out-- over the course of a couple months-- have gone unanswered. I hope you're doing well.

-XO Mx. Protz

Placeholder 17.03.020

The day will come when he will marry his life partner,
and I will still be alone.
Yet another of my most cherished loves
will decide to cut themselves from me. I will go to the wedding,
I will show,
solo, in my best suit-and-tie
(though, really, they will not be mine--
like so much else,
they will be rented,
wearing me,
despite my expert performance
indicating to the contrary),

and I will smile, I will say
in my most polished, not-me voice,
wow, oh, you, yes you, ah and also yes you, the husband, yes I am so happy for you two, yours is truly an inspiration...

And as the whiskey grows sour on my breath
and the night begins to begin to wear on,
though for the rest the night will not have begun,
I will slip away into it, I will disappear
as I have become so good at doing,
and though it may not go unnoticed, it will not matter,

and I can have my sour heart and my acid-blood,
and they will have each other for the foreverest forever
that a venue and a planner can promise.

I cannot see me ending up with anyone but him
(and it has been this way before,

with different hims,
the same hymns,
though altogether individually differing, despite
my presence as the lowest common denominator

[and o!, how low indeed I go...]).

I will think,
as I do now,
of poetry
and solemn things
and how crisp the air is, how familiar...

I will think of this very night, sitting
and reflecting forwards as I so often do (or did),
and I will think of nothing else

but,
perhaps, my
perennial sadness, a beast and a friend and a lover
I cannot shake.

My love has been with me
through thick and thin, and

we are nigh insep'rable,
for which I am ever-grateful.

(Envelop, Quell) Balm's Longing

Vulnerable.

Lovely and bereft, pure-pearlescent.
Blood dribbled down our backs, limbs' prickled commingling.
Wasteful mosquitos--
gluttony, a fucking in the grass.
Granules too ignored, pearls never to form,
cupped mollusk shell of hot tissues.

Eyes locked: election of gaping gazes,
ocular sphincters in rapt relaxation
intaking.
Rebreathed dioxide-carbon, vapor.

Burgeoning and unburdened at once,
all at once,
new oxygen like purest dopamine-
chill breeze, your warmth,

in a rush: sacrum to crown smashing
foreheadmagnetisms
bloodcrust crackling, darkening,
iron.
And still:

your breath's
wet plush, ripe sweet zinc,
shiny pennies, a kiss.
Still:

low hum, formless word, still
your voice vibrating
into mine:
orange sun's cry arcing unto the night.

04.11.018

"Fuck the patriarchy" and it will reproduce; a virus, a cancer. Eat the rich and you will sicken yourself on their excesses. Leave the slewn bodies to decay in plain sight-- devoured by beings incapable of such malicious greed as to be immune: bellies of displaced endangereds filled, cellular memory obliterated, insectuous infestations to mushrooms to microbes, molecular building blocks and aetherous ghosts dissipating eternally on aspens' aspirations-- and the blood will water the land. Let it end. Let it begin.

02.10.018

Mormon sons, witnesses to Jevovah
dressed all alike, peddling by judiciously:
their calves well-muscled,
filled and fed by milk meant for calves,
driving forward chains which turn the wheels
of a world enslaved.

Dreamsequence 12.09.018 / Into The Void

You were in a dream of mine last night. The sequence of events is hard to remember. I was in this big wooded park area, looking for a spot to sit that wasn't too close to anyone else. At some point a large, white, Victorian-style house became part of the dream, and I ran into you there.

You were with a large group of people, there was some sort of gathering there. I think we got to discreetly brush hands with one another at some point. I had to go do or see something (we said no more than a sentence or two each during the entire thing), and I had wanted to say bye or say something more, but the group sort of coalesced around you and you went with them, to a large tour bus, which drove away (inexplicably, as it was through the woods). I wandered off from the house and the grouping of people, into what was a larger woods than it had been earlier in the dream.

There was a great depression in the earth, with a lot of the vegetation having turned brown and faded. It made me think that it had been underwater at some point, and the area had an air about it, something like a curse, but I was cavorting in it. Something magical happened when I entered it-- I was flying a magic kite or I started gliding around myself, can't remember-- and then I found some sort of entrance that led underground. I entered, it was something like a labyrinth, strange markings and fluorescent lines seeming to take me on a path through it.

When I tried to go back I found I was lost, and everything had shifted so that it wasn't the same as before. There were places where I could see through to where the other people were, but I couldn't pass through and they couldn't see me. I met other people down there, or ageless shadows of their own selves, whom had each been down there for different amounts of time, some for hundreds of years. That's all I remember.

Also, hello.

09.09.018

Friday 09/09/09, Beatles Rock Band was released. I worked at Blockbuster. We were to rent out not only the game, but apparently guitar controllers and electronic drum pads as well. The game did not do as well as expected, nor do I remember if we actually carried aforementioned guitar controllers or drum pads available for rental. Probably not. My memory is terrible, and I'm probably fabricating some of this.

I saw Tim Burton's movie "9" with my father. I thought we saw it on opening night, though, again, my memory does not serve me. I remember working my first shift at Target directly afterwards, and being so hungry that I threw up popcorn kernels and probably-rancid oil-based butter substitute. I worked more than 5 hours straight without a meal break; my first meal code violation on my first shift, though this should have been and was the responsibility of my trainer, with whom I was zoning in the Grocery department; learning about how the store's shelves were "left-justified," meaning that the label for each facing of product was to the left of the product itself, and the product merchandised to the right. I learned how to read a shelf schematic, and where to look on the shelf label to determine how many facings each piece of product was to have on the shelf.

I had just had my wisdom teeth out not a few weeks before, and my parents had divorced either right after or right before. I'm pretty sure the date of their divorce (which was a date, in a way; they went out for coffee afterwards and discussed how they might again date someday, once my mom had leveled out from her "pink cloud" sobriety status) was September 5th, the date of my orientation and official hire at Target. Again, my memory does not serve me.

Today, it is nine years later. Breakfast is dread, psych meds, and cold coffee gulped straight from yesterday's pot; overheard: meditation for an excessive hour to an paid-for app which is personified by the voice of a British man. British men are experts, don't you know. British people and their centuries-long colonial occupations are so sweet, and cute, and knowledgeable, and pure. Duh. Everyone knows that, though no-one knows that.

Empty here, if you don't count the volumes of misplaced judgment, corrosive acid. I have traveled distances, yet have realized no displacement.

My memory does not serve me.