the inaccuracy of distance

(seattle, 2011)

green glows edenic here : it is on the ground : circumscribing the horizon : reflecting from the water & sometimes in the clouds : green, coupled with the all-day darkness of winter, begs 2 more than one : though not frightened of the night, alone is best left to the light : i prefer to take my walks as one & when i can see what's ahead of me : since arriving i have walked roughly 5.5 miles a day : in 2 months i've probably walked a total of 330 miles : 330 miles is almost 3 quarters of the distance from here to my old home in montana : if this persists, i may require another set of shoes :

(seattle, 2011)

here the ocean washes out all scent of distance : in ohio, hot in the summertime, you can smell the rain pouring from ten miles away : long before a cloud touches your immediate sky : i imagine this bird had only an end in sight : it pulled itself fast & black & wild through the night air : there was probably no possible way it could see the wire that sliced off its left wing : this must have been the best way :

(boise : dec. 2010 : courtesy of c.)

travel belies any true notion of distance : one can not move to or from a person or place & expect to change the mean geography of a body's attraction : i've been a country away & aroused by the memory of scent so much stronger than touch : success is broken-backed & now the maggots have set in : it will take more than a lifetime to do the impossible work of pleasing the self : so, since we now deal in multiple epochs, why not just work on that, the self? : the only altruistic endeavor :

(chelsea hotel : nyc : march, 2010)

for 8 consecutive months i talked to the same person every day several times daily from a few thousand miles away : i would also write to this person, sometimes just after talking : a few times each month we would talk face to face : if in montana, i would often answer the phone at 5am while racing the headlight of a train running parallel to me along the highway : these conversations were a contact akin to touch : when separated by a distance i had the feeling of someone waking right next to me even though i was very much alone : in december of 2009 the temperature dropped several degrees below zero farenheit for over a week : my cabin rested on 2 train trusses so that the wind could move all around me : one morning i woke to find a frozen glass of water next to my bed : i don't remember a time before that when i have ever felt warmer :

(montana : nov. 2009)

recently, the same thing happened for almost a month & a half : there were various forms of contact with a person multiple times a day : while the perceived responsibility of contact from one side of town to the other shaped a new light inside me, it nearly broke the other : in years prior i have had the increasing desire to see a thing destroyed irreversibly, as though it were more tangible than a thing being : there is a necessity of scaffold : & there is no such thing as need : nothing feels much better than feeding someone, & being fed :

(montana : oct. 2009)

the feeling of being believed is, today, more important than the feeling of being loved : to be believed that one is capable of love :

(home : aug. 2009)

i've always taken walking for granted, which is unfortunate considering that just the act of standing straight up on 2 feet is somewhat of an anomaly in a world where the majority of mammals are quadrupeds : it is the upright posture that the french anthropologist Claude Levis-Strauss argues is the definitive evolutionary truss that makes a human being distinct from all other creatures : standing upright enabled us to evolve into one of the most advanced thinking machines on the planet : the foundation of humanity then, situates itself on the several inches of the soles of our feet : i often mistake soles for souls : & this mistake makes sense : in of the surface of things Wallace Stevens writes, in my room, the world is beyond my understanding,/ but when i walk i see that it consists of three or four hills and a cloud. : from my doorstep in seattle it is roughly 503.3 miles to the doorstep of my old cabin : if i were to walk from seattle to montana along major & minor roads, it would take me somewhere around 6 days and 22 hours : to achieve this time i must walk both day & night, without stopping for a moment : i must do this alone :