This newly formed vegetarianism, I return once again to my roots.  Only the liquor, the beer, the merriment, time and time again seem to bring me back  to the hot dog.  These menageries of meats, encased and enclosed, smothered in cheese and condiment, they sate me, and disgrace me.  But these sauces are not the only things that I wear on my hand, and I am far from disgraced from this.  The developments of this city, the long, cold walks through these streets where it seems there is not another who is home and awake.  This city ascends beside me, while I, in time am awaken, by these developments in my self.

Apparently, these “two dudes”, and the congee noodle house’s poor sign once again know the taste of the pavement.

I think you may have tried at once to carve our names into a tree, and the outcome seems a foreign thing.  I cannot seem to piece it all together, although I know that we were certainly those people who cling to the terrace and cling to each other.  And perhaps we disgusted the masses, or brought them to curse obscenities to love, and tell it to go and fuck itself.  And for these things that would have normally disgusted myself as well, I am far from concerned.  I am newly comfortable, I am newly aware of the changes in myself, and the recollection of feelings that I’d almost given up on.

It’s hard not to jump.  It’s hard not to want to dive in, swim, and just dissolve into solution.  And there are those that would tell me to slow down, to take it easy, to embrace this pace.  And I’m trying to calm this racing mind and the things that want to keep fighting and flighting all the way to the end.  I know the feel of my adrenals, I know the temperature of my stress, and the way it tastes.  I know the eventual return to the masses, and the feelings inside when all the voices get at each other.  I know how easily happiness and sadness change into madness, and every step in between.

I’m standing still.  The diving board is quivering under the weight of these feet and legs.  My toes grip the surface, feeling curiously sandy and aware, of the texture of everything. And the sand might like to simmer and boil just like the tempers of all those cursing profanities at love, telling it to rot on the edge of the board and never quite test the temperature of the water.

The spectators disturbed… by the sound of the cars, or the pace and the taste of the wind on the first of November, all of them distracted, fail to notice my knees.  The joints and the muscles all bending, descending toward my calves.  And my arms spinning backward, my wrists facing frontward, I bounce and rebound, and sail furiously forward.