Secret Gifts for Precious Friends by Johannes de Silentio

1. Just remember when everything was easy, and remember that moment is right now, before any explosions and before any gunshots, just the sounds of wind chimes, hold them in your ears
2. Remember when your sentences were not held together by nerves
3. Remember when (hashtag) when thoughts were more than just glimpses of thoughts and just echoes and twitches
4. I just sit and twitch and you attach the machine to me and my legs muscles are not walking but they are dreaming of walking, matrix machine
5. Trip up and down the stairs and upside-down like Maya Deren stunted stilted softly so that you are appearing hovering above every ghost room blowing breezes through windows
6. Remember the dream you have about somebody, when you predicted they would you would we would become distant, when you looked through Grandpa's submarine and found old letters and old friendships and you know he is alive and dead in this space
7. Once there was a time and once there was not a time
8. Keep the little doll in your pocket named Vasalisa and just let that bitch do whatever Baba Yaga asks of you
9. Dream of the Knight of Faith, what his face looks like as he stares at rats who scurry and at sixteen-year old girls
10. Your fingers' little beaming lights
11. I was real at certain specific times; during our long walks, when I held dream hands on green hills, when you looked me in the eye in the dark cafe with beaming eyes and said this is the right time, when we lay in the hammock little girls looking at the moon, when we slid sideways down the deck, when i kissed you and made your hat fall off on the street, when we walked on train tracks to your far-off 3 am house, when we laughed in the park and fear was gone, when we took pictures at the playground, when i gave you a chance to play that part and you left beaming full of pride, whenever your sweet voice drifts back to me, when you told me about racing down the stones in the river, when we had coffee and you explained aboriginals. i was real at those times.
12. suddenly every you is you, and that was never clearer than in my love poem, and i am kind of bursting at the seams, i know this to be true, but now i know this to be true, and remember how much i know this to be true, so i can write a love poem to a chair and to a dog and to a worst enemy and you will meet me there

The Rules of the Day

1. Enjoy picking the fleas out of small dog's fur and crunching them under your fingers.
2. Contemplate the horror of the fire that almost burned down your house. Stand in awe and confusion and relief while watching the parallel dimensional self arrive to a burnt down house. This is a universe in which cranberry juice does not exist.
3. Appreciate gentle reminders of real life.
4. Imagine the clever conversations you might have with the middle schoolers next door on the stoop, something that would prove to them that you are certainly no longer in middle school anymore, and you no longer adhere to middle school rules.
5. Think of the today's nebulous shape of feelings and spaces, from running by the sea and hearing stories of heartbreak to peace and breathing and feet up on the wall and sleeping dog.
6. Fall helplessly at your own feet. Fall in love and in awe at the shape you made in time with your imperfect body and sad, sad, self-obsessed soul.
7. Did you love somebody today? Were you gentle?
8. If you were gentle you get 10 points.
9. Listen to a voice that makes all of the smiles in my nerves fireworks, and the nerves in my smiles turn to fireworks, and turn into Katy Perry, and be heartbroken by Russell Brand.
9b. If you have recovered from your Russell Brand heartbreak, move forward 10 spaces of transcendence.
10. This morning we were Grumps, and I remembered how important it is to say Hi, I am thinking about you.
11. Hi, I am thinking about you, because you exist. You are alone where you are and I am alone where I am but you exist because I am thinking about you and because I am thinking about you I also exist. Somebody famous said that, I think it was Cap'n Horatio Magellan Crunch.
12. Everybody says you are working hard, don't tell them the truth, that you are actually just watching the John Lennon biopic "Nowhere Boy."
13. Send a limousine or a fairy to pick up your so-called-best-friend from a far away land and take them to Cuba to reenact an escape to America.
14. Don't use any actual names, hide names in other names.
15. Alterego name-dropping.
16. Fragments.
17. Hot bed.
18. Fire
19. Be ready and gracious and forgiving.
20. finally, a narrative: today i was a whore's corpse buried deep inside a mattress and i couldn't get up cause i was dead. there's no more life. but somebody said hey it's okay get up and come look at the sea, don't be afraid of life, don't worry about what you care about or what you want, just act, just do, because otherwise you will not lift a finger. just keep doing. so my fingers played piano and i felt okay again. and i started not panicking about flat 9s. that's for losers. and i stopped and stared and inhaled plastic. and i gave treats. and i sang KORN. and this was a day full of life and at first i said no.
my car is full of plastic. barbie's last name is roberts or jones or something. she is all-american. barbie is the only one who can save us from global warming. totally greenhouse barbie. barbie's teats will nurse all of the polar bears back to life. and we'll sing gospel hymns out of every 90s song. and we'll be okay now that we have your phone records.
21. Is Snowden a Hero?

Heartbeats Honesty Irony

1. Listen to how fast your poor heart beats, too fast, struggling to move blood through this entire body expanding in a universe of fat, underneath there is nothing but fancy sadness.

2. I'd like to be honest ...this isn't working out. I don't know you.

3. Today I was happiest when you told me the story of how you took care of your deaf dumb and blind brother and he died January 17 and I feel this is real love and when I said I was a musical director your eyes lit up and you said God is here and God is working in mysterious ways and so forth. And you said things that I didn't dare say but was blessed with and you're a gift.

4. Watching Crossroads and thinking of all of those lost buried boxes.

5. I have a vice and it is All-American.

6. Tomorrow it's Raw Foods. 

dear diary

1. Do yoga on the bluff, plus howl and primal scream.
2. After 2 days of freedom, enjoy sudden hints of jealousy, shame, and a wall of distance.
3. We are speaking, and in our glowing eyes every word is important, and then slowly bricks build up our lungs and eyes and tongue, and everything that has been said is no longer meaningful, and you feel it and say sometimes i feel like nothing i say is worth a fuck, and i want to say yes and no, and all of a sudden i'm a meatball, and i say don't think that. and then there's the impulse.
4. i listen to the poet you love, and all of our words written down
5. sometimes there is no wisdom left, only words
6. brilliant things, everything is contained in your laugh
7. we hide away in pleasures of the world when we really want to taste thick molasses of godblood
8. you say something that resonates, then not, then we disappear
9. what impulse are you following now?
10. soy cappucino
11. under the evening tent, candlelit eating chocolates, i hope you are not disappointed.
12. you ask if i saw your accidental penis while you were gardening. we think it inspired last night's dream about penises growing in a bed of soil. i could not identify who each belonged to, and i did not want to make a mistake and choose the wrong penis. especially if it meant incest.
13. he didn't believe that i had these dreams
14. i suspect my ex-lover and ex-best friend are now lovers.
15. read the insights
16. every moment of nap, of insecurity, of directionlessness, i feel anxiety and panic, and then i remember, ah yes i am being taken care of, please direct me towards something, because the devil certainly makes work for these hands
17. emails and calls and deleting voicemails
18. i wrote a song and sent it to you
19. you you you
20. i make plans, practice songs, and my soul hovers and hovers and hovers. it is a will o' wisp. all i want to do is make children happy.
21. suspect mind. i fuckin' hate musicals.
22. make your list of what is Good and Bad and cross everything out.
23. what are their rules? what are yours?

Lust/List/Liszt

1. Consider writing A list of Titles of lists to best capture this morning list-making experience

2. View friends' blog about people-as-lists. (I am this music, these places, these people, these books, these ideas.) Beautiful portraits capturing form and essence. (But still makes me anxious. or listless? I thought they were synonyms. Turns out they are definitely not.)

3. "Listin'" to Your Heart

4. Write a list of all of the tiny, impractical, wild, beautiful goals and dreams and projects (dress-making, gardening, homemade cider, humanitarian aid, peace corps, articulate blogs, etc)

5. Find out how much time Mind Judge Judy actually spends in session. Every time she makes a comment on somebody else, I identify her. 

6. Read about Doctors Without Borders and then imagine joining the Peace Corps.

7. Decide with fervor, yes, this is where I need to be, away from the enormous mental brain of lists and orgasmic circles disguised as neat little narratives, digging trenches and getting my hands dirty and listening. To be with other humans and hear stories and to shut my little face and do some good old fashioned hard work.

8. Chopin or Liszt?

Lightbulb Game

1. Routine: Sing The Thrilling Morning Song as The Mayor of Morning Town
2. Warehousisms: Kissed by a Rose, Dreidel, Upon Your Lips "you're my/my dick"
3. Play dead, watch friends play dead, resurrect on third day like Simon, but don't wait three days.
4. Who is the Mayor of Evening Town?
5. Confession Booth Bathroom
6. Sit and drink coffee and type the show's theses.
7. Create aphorisms/warkentinisms/imagined truths/stolen ideas: "Truth is, essentially a creative act" and "the point is... have a resilient imagination, you'll need it... to imagine there is a truth.
8. Imagine a world in which this is true.
9. John Malkovitch Game. Some day.
10. Coffee, soup, bread. Hot yoga.
11. Cold yoga.
12. Inspiration.
13. Dream of the play.
14. Cut and paste literary love letters, rather than attempt to write your own. It's po-mo-ro-mo.
15. Imagine the movies you will see.
16. Have your cake and eat it too!
17. Know that all of this is primal behavior disguised as civilization. Compare yourself to the magpie in the tree, who is probably not thinking how he will be better on another day, when he is a better bird.
18. Finally begin your ahhhrt blog. Satisfaction.

The Memory Game

1. Stare and observe, step out of predator/prey, notice something new.
2. Wildness. Express. Absorb.
3. Wander and wander, through graveyards and bat-covered trees.
4. Decide if you perceive consolation or threats in saintly text.
5. Heart-to-hearts, graffiti hop-skotch in alma park, glitter snail fire pole.
6. Symbolic meaning in everything, challenge of erasing
7. Memory game. Have an experience with another person and write down what you remember. Top 10 things.
8. Collective dreaming?
9. Imagine who you would be with no limitations
10. List your heroes: Anais Nin, Jans Svankmeyer, Bjork, Dali, David Lynch, Stephin Merritt