I haven’t been sleeping well. But that’s okay. As funny as it sounds, I know I’m in a good place when I can find more time to think(and honestly enjoy the extra time in my head..or maybe nowhere near my head but milling around in the heart, jitterbugging on the linoleum there).

Last night I had some gin/lemonade with my roommate and her friend on the porch, met a neighbor and watched a band roll in to crash for the night. The same band I heard playing from a second story window hours earlier in Lawrenceville. I was walking home from Tait’s house post-dinner and heard the beautiful noise of strings, bass, shouting singers. Nice to put faces with the moment. I went to bed and listened to my neighbor playing the saw in his backyard for a while. Sleep did not find me for some time, but the gin helped.

I cannot tell you how happy it makes me to say: I can sleep less, and be okay with it. Being tired is being something.

Maybe we are in a constant state of release. Maybe you wear through memories until they are the softest thinnest fabric and something tells you to stop because any more wear would mean tearing the sucker in two. Maybe making new ones becomes more important and then from there it isn’t a question of where your mind is—it is right here, it is processing what comes to it..pull from what you know. You learn to let go in the sweetest way. Maybe you finally become what you believe in. Maybe once that happens, you start to sleep less.

Connections

Pablo Neruda

Yes, I need to start a fall music compilation soon.

Oh and right around the corner? A little bit of this:

Well, obviously. Football.

When you adopted the bee I didn’t say anything—I figured the inevitable sting would talk enough, eventually. You were hellbent on training this, flight patterns and to come when called. Tore flowers from the ground for breakfast, fashioned a leash of thread, needle wand pinched and leading. The effort so much. A tiny bed was made, but the thing never rested, only hovered and hummed(the melody to which you drifted, one honey soaked finger extended off the bed edge). Things could not be persuaded different. Your clothes started looking like burlap; you fashioned awnings for eyes and made pistil necklaces. The closest thing to free. You were buying magnifying glasses and still thinking of names.

Heat lamps turned the room into a hue of butter, a birthday party for tiny wings. Sweet things as gifts. The bee stared past you, out the window(the candle went lit until the wax purple pooled the icing). The best present: a fingerpainted portrait of vibrations.

The back of the knee. The strike like fractal lick, a hand to it immediate. Little bristled body droned around seconds before falling. A funeral we all attended. Yellow and dark trumpet salute. Even your band aid the color of mourning.

Click here
if you wish to donate and/or send your thoughts for Stephanie, Christian, and their family.

No, I do not know them personally. But this is the positive nature of the internet–the power to bring a new community of people together to support others when they need it the most. The more eyes/ears/hearts/thoughts on this matter, the better.

WASHINGTON (AP) - Jack Abramoff, the once powerful lobbyist at the heart of a far-reaching political corruption scandal, was sentenced to four years in prison Thursday by a judge who said the case had shattered the public’s confidence in government.

Abramoff, who fought back tears as he declared himself a broken man, appeared crestfallen as the judge handed down a sentence lengthier than prosecutors had sought.

Over the past three years, Abramoff has come to symbolize corruption and the secret deals cut between lobbyists and politicians in back rooms or on golf courses or private jets. The scandal shook Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House to Capitol Hill and contributed to the Republicans’ loss of Congress in 2006.

“I come before you as a broken man,” Abramoff said at his sentencing before U.S. District Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle. “I’m not the same man who happily and arrogantly engaged in a lifestyle of political and business corruption.”

He added later that, “My name is the butt of a joke, the source of a laugh and the title of a scandal.” (more…)

if pocrhlights stay on for the body not coming home
if the road gives out will our wheels still roll
if the plants talk to fences
take them down in leaf embraces
if the hand shakes midsalute
if the hammer never rusted
if your body didn’t talk like that
if I didn’t listen
if the suitcase didn’t make sense
if this wasn’t it
if time knew less
if I didn’t insist on putting on top of clavicle
the axis
if change was the only thing to stay
still
if if if—
world don’t say you’ve never.

My bike ride to work is now a total of, maybe, 10 minutes. I cross the Millvale Bridge on my route, and I’ve been consistently timing the following: a sun, new to the day and still yawning, is right over the tree line–creating a haze/fog that is the most brilliant color of yellow/orange. I ride right through this hue.

I always glance over to that sun and put one fist up in the sky for it. And that’s how I start my day.

On the good foot.

Democratic vice-presidential nominee Joe Biden said yesterday that he and running mate Barack Obama could pursue criminal charges against the Bush administration if they are elected in November.

Biden’s comments, first reported by ABC news, attracted little notice on a day dominated by the drama surrounding his Republican counterpart, Alaska governor Sarah Palin.

But his statements represent the Democrats’ strongest vow so far this year to investigate alleged misdeeds committed during the Bush years.

“If there has been a basis upon which you can pursue someone for a criminal violation, they will be pursued,” Biden said during a campaign event in Deerfield Beach, Florida, according to ABC.

“[N]ot out of vengeance, not out of retribution,” he added, “out of the need to preserve the notion that no one, no attorney general, no president — no one is above the law.”

Obama sounded a similar note in April, vowing that if elected, he would ask his attorney general to initiate a prompt review of Bush-era actions to distinguish between possible “genuine crimes” and “really bad policies”.

“[I]f crimes have been committed, they should be investigated,” Obama told the Philadelphia Daily News. “You’re also right that I would not want my first term consumed by what was perceived on the part of Republicans as a partisan witch hunt, because I think we’ve got too many problems we’ve got to solve.”

Congressional Democrats have issued a flurry of subpoenas this year to senior Bush administration aides as part of a broad inquiry into the authorisation of torturous interrogation tactics used at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp.

Three veterans of the Bush White House have been held in criminal contempt of Congress for refusing to respond to subpoenas: former counsel Harriet Miers, former political adviser Karl Rove, and current chief of staff Josh Bolten. The contempt battle is currently before a federal court.

source