Go to Sleep With the Light On

the last day of my 20s I stood in a narrow room where they asked me questions about incarceration history and my sexual habits and stole blood from my right pointer finger and inspected my arms for veins and elbows for bruising. later, but not much later, I stared at the sheetrock ceiling as narrow tubes sucked fluids from my body and gaunt-eyed women with needles and tape walked slowly to their charges. My jeans are torn at the cuff and stringy at edges, as they've been since birth. This place is like a hospital, that gives you money. The ceiling is like a hospital's. The white coats are like doctor coats. The halogen lights are like, the beds are like, but they won't let you sleep. The nurses thump the side of the pillows. A man in a trucker hat and grey beard and freckled arm starts, almost pulling his needles out. This is like some other beds I've slept in, where the ceiling and lights and noises kept me from rest and I pulled blankets and arms off me before shuffling back into daylight, through tinted glass doors, in rudimentary bandages, no goodbyes. The man who unhooks me is tired but friendly, sees my novel and tells me if he could be anyone in literature he'd be in The Brothers Karimazov, and he'd be Aloyisha. The good one.

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This is the first thing I've written since turning 30 on tuesday. I will probably turn it into a Haibun. Thanks to Ryan for the prompt. I am bad at spelling Russian names.

plasma, portland and poetry factories.

In a few minutes I go in for a short-ish shift at The Vera Project where I will do some information culling and website updating in a room full of people all being periodically amused by some non-official thing they saw on a website. Then I hitch a ride with Lindsey Tibbot down to Portland, where I'm reading at the Working Theater Collective's Beer and Cookies Cabaret. Apparently I'm between a band, a comic and a juggler? Something like that. Then the next couple of days is ZAPP-duty with the Portland Zine Symposium, one of the largest er, zine symposiums in the country.

So it's busy for me. Yesterday (after a few and a half other things) I hit up the first ever Capitol Hill Mobile City Fair-- basically a bunch of booths and entertainments set up in the Bank of America Parking Lot. All Cap Hill places. Drag queens jumping rope, people eating pork tortas, a bunch of kids and parents dancing in the back of a U-Haul truck while a dude spun club hits. I sat at the Pilot Books booth as part of the "Poetry Factory" where myself and a handful of other hardworking writers wrote poems-to-order for the donation of canned food or a smile.
one guy says "I just got off work. I need something positive. Write me a poem about, um, not puppydogs and world peace. . . friends."
So I did. and it made him really happy.

On my way off the hill I passed by Twice Sold Tales and sold a couple Tolkein books for like, no cash at all, but the woman was enthusiastic about recommending a spot in Ballard where I can sell plasma and thats how she ate for about two years.
Then two college kids came in and asked if she had any Euclid and that made her very happy.