But · what · does · it · all · mean, · Basil?

Downturned mouths on thin faces
with flat cheekbones that still press the skin taunt
like sheets of cliff-face walls wrapped in cotton,
and from the side, too,
they're visible but just as processes of angles and planes
as if put together by someone who didn't understand
the beauty of what they were creating.
The chin, the end of all faces,
is smaller than what the logic of proportions would predict
and from this angle is
the perfect mirror complement to your nose.
Eyelashes, too.
Long dark spines that shush the eyes down and away,
casting gazes out of sight
like ornate shutters on quartzite walls
with secrets hush hush hushed.
And is it so wrong to imagine it broken?
See it cracked and purple puffy and hurt,
wet from shame like the deepest heartbreak
or the most cunning betrayal. The tip
of a lobe peering from beneath a mop of brown, arrogant hair
incites the sniper, the hunter, the taker of things not offered or given.
A stealer, a voyer, a spider.
This dark crown coiffs a pretty face
like melted fudge repels flies from a putrid custard.
Go ahead with your slanted mouth
and your deflated cheeks
and those black ever black wool lashes lying just so,
the contrast of which is by far the most sensuous thing about you.
Continiue. I'm finished anyway,
nothing about you is poetic and
I can find the exotic fragility of your features
in a thousand ephemeral piece of shit beauties.

My hair is getting quite blonde from all this sunshine shit. I got a retarded haircut and I've given up trying to tame all the white little flyaways on my head.

I'm excited for Virgin Fest and Hamlet at the Shakespeare Theater in DC. I also might see the Decemberists with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra (hot) or White Stripes and Muse at the Patriot Center. All of this sweet, sweet music in the hot and heavy summer air! I'm also looking to hit up some local bazaars in DC and the National Portrait Gallery 'cause that's my shit. Yo.

Also: Harry Potter dress up is coming, it's coming, it's coming. Plus the fourth o' July I'm undecided where I'll be. I have never seen the fireworks in DC which is ridiculous considering my tactical location - so. Maybe there.

Wow. Fun night last night. Aaaand, now I'm napping so I will have energy to go hiking later this evening.

This coming week will see me spread so thin across the spiky demands of class, scholars, and self-routine that something somewhere is going to be punctured. I am just hoping it's nothing too vital.

What the fuck. I want summer in my hands, full and heavy in my palm, dripping lush and fat and good through my fingers. I don't care how fast I let it slip away between the cracks, I want it now and I've never been very good at patience.

    I felt a lot of different things while reading through Body Learning by Michael Gelb these past couple of weeks. I thought some of the ideas presented in it were interesting and influential in the way I now perceive my body. As a long, gangly boy it is helpful to take refuge in the inspirational stories that dance through the pages of this book like my dream self effortlessly does in my mind. I desire to let my physical self go the way my emotional self has taken wing after perusing the descriptive images in Body Learning. Gelb’s novel leads me through the evolution of kinesiology from the fleshy babe to the crickety, weathered, and decayed mass of humanity that is the culminating dénouement of man. On a personal note, after finishing the last sumptuous pages of the novel, I ran to my window and let fly the most guttural, primal wail of triumph and victory that my feeble and long neglected vocal chords could muster. I bled, but the blood was my talisman. My talisman of boneless repose and body awareness. So when you ask me, what are your comments on this book I say nay, nay procurer of books and novels to youthful minds open and yawning for knowledge. This book has been in the collective unconscious for ages. The words just needed to bring its potency to the surface of my mind. This book has existed in my soul since the moment I was born, since the instant I was spawned in the womb – conceived during a late night passion fray that cyclically draws parallels to the book’s liberal body prerogatives. My life, in conclusion, is this book. I am this book. I book. iBook.

The End.

The first line and a half belong to the immortal genius of Nappy Sparacino. The rest is my paltry offering of essaydom and humor at 2:00 in the morning.

I have learned a lot this week. I like learning - expanding my mind, casting my thoughts into the unfamiliar. I do not like having my body rubbed raw by the abrading hair of boys' upper torsos. I do not like having stuffed pandas stolen from me, wrapped in plastic bags, and hidden in Mr. Nappy's closet. I do like the university (in)Convenience store and it's supply of Rice Dream soy milk.

Today I appointed my roommate and good friend, Lauren Schlenger, as my delegate and representative on the Careless Council - a body of people who decide whether or not I have performed a careless enough action to warrant the loss of a Careless Card (of which I have 12). When all my cards are gone I have to do whatever Jeff says as punishment for being too "careless".

People came back to UMD today and I was happy to see them. I have a concert Saturday for choir where we'll be singing Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms with the UMD Symphony Orchestra.

So I'm sitting here before my final final (art theory) thinking of ways to procrastinate. I'm scrolling through my friends' list, I'm looking at facebook. You know. I have about an hour and a half. I could be reading about Hegel, Schopenhauer, Marx. Or not.

I'm considering committing orange juice homicide and leaving my tropicana out all day. Mostly because I am too lazy to walk back to the fridge.

I'm dirty. I can feel it.

It's the kind of grime ground deep into fleshy pores, past them, mashed into every fiber of muscle and every spasm of nerve ending, clogging veins and filling bones. It's that transient horror you see if you pass a mirror too fast: for a second the glass turns traitor and flashes you a nasty bit of ugliness. No mere mirror image, some form of truth straight up and dirty. A trick of the light? Beelzebub above your lavatory sink? Like a perverse kink hidden beneath pedestrian domesticity. Gasp! Repulsion! This filth comes as nasty, dark little secrets that fester fester fester, polluting the lubdub lubdubs of normalcy, of respectability, until the frantic staccato of spreading corruption has beat its way into your blood and you gag. Can you see it? This aura of taint that chokes heavy around me? I can't scrub out my stains.

I've no easy rinse-wash cycle for my deeds.