Trees in Damascus

These excerpts come from a book I wrote when I was 18.

[Unknown about where these fall in the book]

“We are lost, you the reader, and I, the writer. We have come this far into the world of men of the “Yo no ‘sé’” prefix, diluted and soluble in water. Seamen who cannot swim when their heads are lost like chickens and their own nerves breaking down without a head to keep them sane. Bread stealing birds from your feet. Feet growing for hands and vice versa. Alone and not knowing it. Stooping behind a house to tell a yarn to the neighborhood boys you’d like to fuck. Boys and boys and their own private vices. Their own private versas. Veritas. Veritably. Lost in Sinai, Mount of Moriah killing our own chosen son of Ishmael ma non troppo. I will admit as the record scratches and skips back to “zero” and not “one,” knowing nothing again, that I am one with the Father in all the blasphemous senses.

“Tell me your goddam name, dear child. Highway. Riding downward south along our truisms, aren’t we? Veritas. Saying what we want when we’re drunk and telling the truth that there’s really nothing there to most people. Play with my cunt! That’s drunk-talk. Journey of the first-degree burns.

“I know what it is. I really do. It’s beneath these words and these pages. Beneath. It’s your legs, it’s your feet, it’s your hands, my daughter. It’s your thighs (milky white or caramel or dark as sin), your thoughts (milky white or caramel or dark as sin), your knowledge (milky white or caramel or dark as sin). I know it’s you reading this to guide unto me. You I will not kill but they I would to get to you. You are my Keats Grecian Urn. My pillar to stand all the ages against and rest under the ashes of Pompeii falling down on the ground, on its hands and knees to praise Allah towards the east. I will praise Allah all the days of my life for Isaac was God’s chosen son to carry all the nations! La’Illallah Il’Allahu! Veritas! Praise Reality for He is All!”

…

“Planted in the ground, white yet azure and tall against the sunflowers unending like a pedestal for my queen or a monolith for my love. Up above and out and around the holding stands, awaiting its subject. She is coming and she is there, just beyond the horizon, and I know when she is to arrive or whether she is within this field, coming towards the pedestal. Nothing is known. Love is like religion, in some aspects. You know which ones.

” Quaquaqua.

” I wish I could have told SK all these things when he was drunk off his rocker and crazy as the night.

” Later, SK would say to me, in regards to another girl, “You know me: I don’t know my emotions unless I’m shitfaced.”

” “Or drunk off your ass,” I replied, thinking of SK with shit all over his face taking artistic nudes to be put up at the LACMA one day.

” After this brief conversation, we left for Pasadena, a great coming up home away.”