autumn

when i stepped out
and the wind kissed my face,
i looked up
into the unending blue
deep autumn sky

the sun,
once a georgia fireball
that left me sweaty
from its lick
and burned me
with its stare,
now visibly pained
from strenuous summer work,
leaned to the side
letting the shadows
ooze further on the ground

like water that spreads
over hot concrete slowly
cooling, darkening.

the infinite celestial blue above
so clear
that i could see
a mile high
an eagle
on wide black wings

circle two
floating,
flying,
L
o
n
g
circles,

but then, pushed
(or pulled, it seemed) by divine wind,
the same wind that
kissed my cheeks,

drift and shrink westward
on a search
always moving on

his purpose

not to stop at every little tree
like the sparrows
and the mocking-birds

but instead

to soar
above worldly obstacles
and inhibitions.

imagine
the life
of the eagle

summer wilts
as winter breathes
over the land
past the hills:
autumn comes
to bring
autumn leaves
in gold
_______

watch the people
shout and cry
and chastise and worry
and cheat and point
and bargain and sneak
and hurt

and my God
dosen't shout at me
and He dosen't chastise me
and He dosen't cheat me
and He dosen't hurt me

He
kisses my face
with wind

Creole Belle

my father

Enter Night

My Summer

angel

my mother

brooke

In Casual Conversation

7:03 PM, Concarneau, France

Returning from a solid day of grasping wet, cold lines, my entire body sprayed with North Atlantic sea spit, I stumble into the 3rd floor mess hall of the sailing school. Boisterous sounds of people and smells of food blast my senses. My shaky legs carry me to one of the many hexagonal tables, where I accompany my comrades, each exemplifying the unique characteristics of a day on the sea: cracked lips, sun-reddened cheekbones and noses, squinted eyes, and the hair.

Hair that had once been molded is now inflated, fluffed and roughed. Hair blown back far enough to create the illusion of movement in any direction, containing the furies of the wind. Hair crusted over with the salts of the sea, tossed, agitated, trembling, unsuited to the relaxed disposition of the owner.

"Teen angst," Jeremy says at last. His black hair, usually contained, now flies up from his head, wavering and electrified.

"What?" someone says.

"Nic, that's the only explanation. You have teen angst."

Before replying, Nic directs a discerning stare at little Jeremy.

"Just because I have an opinion on everything," Nic begins, "means I have teen angst? Is that what you're saying?" The five other people at the table start to grin. Here it comes.

"Yes. You obviously display the symptoms of being in conflict with your changing environment through judgmental tirades concerning nearly everything."

Everyone chuckles. Braunstein snorts.

"Okay, okay," reasons Nic. "Comeaux, do I have teen angst?" The table turns toward me, patiently awaiting my response.

"Every teen has teen angst, dude; even Jeremy. That's why its called teen angst. Jeremy just rationalizes everything instead of judging everything."

Nic, relieved, smirks subtly around the table, while Jeremy wears an understanding grin on his face.

The clinking of silverware mingled with constant dinnertime chatter and laughter continues around the room as small hubs of people I know engage in lax and involving conversation at the separate tables. I look down at my plate, round and white. I have eaten nearly everything.

Quietly, I catch sight of a piece of blackened chicken. I glance back up at Jeremy, and notice an uncanny resemblance between his hair and the jagged edges of the morsel. Intrigued, I also find a misshapen stuffed red pepper that slightly imitates Nic's dyed-red and careless floppy hair. The small patch of rice soaking in brown gravy looks nearly like Braunstein's turgid curls. As I continue to search my plate, I find more and more bits of the tasty meal that call to mind certain classmates.

A hand quickly falls to the table and snatches the plate. Stunned, I follow the plate with my eyes. My heartbeat quickens, and life drags as the focus is placed mutely on my plate. Another hand holds a new, clean trash bag open. The plate grabber tilts, and the remnants of my meal slide toward the edge of the plate. Each bit drops to the bottom of the bag, unseen, unsmelled, untasted.

I attempt to protest, but my voice is lost. The plate, emptied of its goodness except for a thin film of juices and gravies splotching the surface, is handed back to me. The hands empty other plates at the table, then move on to the next. I tear a piece of French bread from the loaf on the table to sop up the liquids, and savor. The faint memories of the meal dissolve in my mouth. Where did my food go?

Something struck me at that instant, in the back of my brain. Feelings of companionship sink into the void of loss. These people, that I have eaten with, that I have lived with, that I have shared with, will be removed from my life. My shoulders fall to the floor, I become disoriented and abruptly lose my sense of balance. My consciousness drifts out of my body, and I observe my empty being in freeze frame, devoid of substance.

Looking up, I see the fierce red sun streaming into the room, splashing onto objects at sharp angles. The warming light casts a glow, reflecting off of various silverware and glass, painting fluid dreams on the white ceiling. The French sun sets on the ocean beyond the buildings and rooftops, through the trees and clouds of a bittersweet summer.

Time. Only time distances me from the murky darkness of the coming days, the blind and stumbling pre-dawn of a new challenge, new friendships. God, let me savor life. As I focus my eyes on the vibrant group before me, I resolve not to let time wash away the etchings people make on my soul.

"Hey!" I exclaim. I have the table's attention once again. "Who feels like some French ice cream? I don't know 'bout yall, but I do."

We rise, our resurgence marked by our debonair hair, and bounce off together to a local creamery.

music & culture

While scrounging around the dark recesses of my father's bookcase cabinets one day, my hand brushed across a large stack of phonograph albums, and they shifted out of place. So I picked them up: the entire Beatles' record collection as originally released, album art and all. I knew Dad loved the Beatles. I knew the Beatles were purportedly the greatest rock band of all time. As the platter began to rotate Abbey Road, and the mechanical arm slowly moved to the beginning of the record, I was already transforming my perspectives, reconstructing my world at every chord. Musically speaking, the new sounds were intriguing, and I wanted more. I wanted to learn and absorb everything about this strangely familiar cultural evolution. In the succeeding months, I sorted through my father's LP's. Taking those I thought were incredible, with a little ingenuity, I hooked up the record player to my computer and burned CD's full of eclectic mixes, tasting such genres as Spanish guitar or 70's funk. While some of my friends continued to pollute their ears with much of the shallow, mindless pop mainstream, music began to live inside me. The sounds of Yes and Simon and Garfunkel caressed my weary soul when I returned home from the world of assaulting hyperactive trash. But this was only the beginning of my sonic voyages.

With the coming of the Internet into my home, any remaining shield between myself and the utter immensity of the world was torn apart, and endless possibility of knowledge stretched beyond comprehension. I was giddy at the thought. The only limiting factor was the 56 kilobits per second at which I received information. I delved and dabbled as deep as I wanted into a certain genre or new groove, like the origins of punk rock or the establishment of techno, both from the dirty backalleys of London and Germany. I was exposed to thousands of bands, artists, poets, and cultural movements, thirsting for the intense diversity of human expression in music and other art forms. Then my life took a turn between my sophomore and junior years, a turn due east to Louisiana, and I moved away from my friends, my school, everything I had known. I had spent a month in France, living the language and the life of a French student with a family, but I always knew I would return to familiar friends and home. In this change, I lost those constants.

Life was jagged, awkward, and unreal for six months. In my emotional stress, I withdrew into sound. I picked up my guitar and played for hours, examining life, humanity, soul. In music I began to rediscover myself. Coming out of the depths halfway through my junior year, weathered and hardened from self-battles, my reconstructed perspective of life and culture was crisp and real. I formed a friendship with another guy who enjoyed listening to phonographs and exploring music and life. Anyone overhearing our fervent conversations of jazz genius John Coltrane, psychedelic mastermind Jimi Hendrix, or blues man Buddy Guy would see the bond between us. Now, we jam after school with guitars and experiment with new sounds and cultures.

Consequently, man's cultural evolution fascinates me; as soon as I discover yet another facet of human expression, I grasp at it and pull my focus into it. My passion for music reflects this thirst for new discovery. As I continue to absorb more music and knowledge, even more is revealed to me. Every new experience is a challenge. From Miles Davis to Pink Floyd, the hues and shades of cultural identity are part of my musical palette.

The Passionate Biologist to His Cell Structures

lets see if I can type in the dark

one day there was a little dwarf. He liked to play on water skis and eating strawberries with lots of cream cheese. The cream cheese was really special because it was so sweet and smooth like cream cheese should be. BUT! The dwarf didnt want to tell anyone that he liked cream cheese so much because he thought people would make fun of him. His llama friend was talking to him one day in the forest. They discussed the benefits of cream cheese discussion as they sat on toadstools under a shady oak tree. "So, it must be really embarassing to talk about such a disgusting food product."

"Actually, when I start talking about it, my salival glands are triggered by the mere thought of juicy red strawberries covered in creamy goodness, and my speech is severely impaired. So I come across to people as a drooling, groaning dwarf with a speech impediment who talks to llamas about strawbgwekajgdfnallllllaaaaaaaaaaaaaassssss...."

And the dwarf couldn't help himself. His mouth slowly dragged to a crawl and then hung motionless as saliva drizzled undaunted to the forest floor. The llama then conveniently remembered that he had an appointment at his local ornithologist.

Now that we've covered the drooling problem, lets talk about other dwarf idiosyncrasies. The dwarf also liked listening to nu-age death metal rock bands. This caused several problems for his forest neighbors. They, for an inconcievable reason, preferred the music of the birds to the succulent sounds of Son of Satan Harry and the Frothy Death-Breeding Bastards. So the forest inhabitants decided to stage a coup to remove the dwarf. They gathered inconspicuously in Sally Skunk's undergound retreat. Although everyone knew it was a pretty stinky place to meet, they were running out of options.

"Look," said Sally, "he either needs to lower his volume to at least a droning roar or get the heck out of Friendship Forest." The rebels all grunted in approval while holding their noses, which is a miracle. You can't grunt and hold your nose at the same time!

A giant biscuit was meanwhile hurtling through the atmosphere, and was directed dangerously close to the very forest that we are speaking of. "It's not like some random flying object will just destroy him and his stereo and music collection, so its up to us to eliminate the dwarf," said Sally. And then the biscuit tore into the dwarf's treehouse pad and obliterated said pad with its buttery flaky crust. The dwarf wasn't too sad.

"Free breakfast for life!" said the dwarf.

Springtime

Intensity

And then, I saw it, the black scoundrel. With exaggerated and definite features, it barely clung to the wooden surface, for it was enormous in size and weight. On the surface of its crudely elliptical body, tiny hairs thickly spattered and brambled themselves into a jungle of stubble. It had been eluding me in the shadows, when suddenly, the insect spasmodically flung itself onto the window, framed in a small patch of light. Only then did I know that the entire existence of this winged beast would end as pointless as that of the moth I murdered last Thursday. Such contempt, horror, and disgust filled my thoughts to its vile, filthy, dirty being, that the dark creature seemed to snicker at me, rubbing its polluted antennae with its filthier, hairier extremities of the lower torso. Then I swung, knowing I would smash its bulging eyes, its veined and flimsy transparent wings, its repulsively shiny and colored abdomen... squirting intestinal juices in a small explosion.

However, without warning, it sprung into the air, freed in the tiniest instant before contact and utter destruction. Yet, I am not so easily defeated. I simply spotted the miniscule monster planted on the wall nearby, and with clenched teeth, delivered the blow once more, with added rage to my backhand swatter swing. Alas, the scoundrel swiftly swooped away, taunting my fury with an unbearable buzzing intermittent in my ears. The demon seemed to be escaping the blunt conclusion to its life which I so carefully had plotted out for it, but its deceitful and deviously simple-minded way of doing so had thoroughly antagonized me.

Breathless, I paused for a moment to allow my seething wrath to both tranquilify from the previous exertion and build up for the next one. In my well-cluttered surroundings, the fiend evaded detection as I slowly scanned for it. I then picked myself up off my knees and rose to my full height to survey the room. A moist hand firmly grasped the thin metal handle of the weapon that I brandished for the sole purpose of eliminating that villain. The imminent stillness in the heated air surrounding me gave off a rancid smell, and I knew I was close to my goal. The more that I thought about ripping the beast into shreds of tiny flesh, the more a devilish grin spread upon my sweaty face.

What had occurred next must have only gone by in a short 3 seconds or less, but while my brain and reflexes were blazing, it seemed an eternal struggle. There, across the entire landscape of my room, it lay. In the intensity of the encounter, my highly pressurized death-passion sparked, and I flew. Fire lurched through my nasal passages. Pure hate seized my conscious mind, as well as every muscle in my limber body, and with spectacular speed I was upon it. I felt its fear, drew back my arm, and, with the sharpened senses of a predator, watched as the insect took a last futile leap into the air. My swinging swatter met it, and smashed into the ground. I discovered myself to be screaming the hot air out of my lungs. I then dropped my smoldering weapon, and left to take a cold shower.

rambling and dreaming (translation: randomis maximus)

How many cups of sugar does it take to get to the moon? Well, in order to analyze the infrastructure of this highly ecologically sound inquiry, we must interpret the speaker's inner meaning of further psychological defectuals in full hypothesizing of the cross-examination. While botanically separate from the communal implacability inside the conglomerate flamboyancy, recompensating for the snide bleating of the intercontinental goats concurrently apprehending the defunct appraisals.

WELL! I'm back for now and I am ready to completely and utterly destroy any last shred of bleating intercontinental mountain goats in my documentary! Now, where was i Ah, yes! The last thing I recall was my father silently closing the door to my room in the middle of the night and then immediately afterwards I sensed another presence in the room. It was not a presence of goodness. No, exactly the opposite it was the SANDMAN! He had been lurking in my closet for at least 15 minutes, yet only now did I recognize that same stale scent and that familiar oozing green light from the closet. The large, swanky fingers wrapped slowly around the cold handle, and they pushed with forces unknown to mankind. As the monster's immediate attention was to it's prey it had not seen the grotesque Lego set lying hideously on the floor in front of its enormous, smelly, unusually blistered feet. As it placed the sensitive appendage solidly on the toy, a scream of mercy and pain mixed with a chunk of anger slipped out of its sweaty mouth and into the cool night air. Amazingly, despite my cries of attention for my father's safety, he did not heed to my calls, and I was left alone to defeat the monster. My mind raced. Adrenaline pumped through my tiny veins and suddenly, I had the strength of a thousand dung beetles! I quickly snatched my handi-snacks stick as a crude weapon against my foe. Springing to my feet, I then realized that I was only a kid and I was dealing with a large, hairy Sandman. He promptly shoved me down his pulsing throat and into his vile intestinal tract. I, amazingly still conscious, yet disoriented, attempted to use the red snacking stick by jabbing it into random crevices, hoping to puncture a major artery from the inside, and possibly a way out of the slobbering beast. I happened to rip my snacking tool through the creature's belly button, rendering a quick escape for me, and a slow and painful death for my captor. As I emerged from the Sandman, I began to feel the intestinal juices I had been soaking in eating away at my Batman, Knight of the Dark pajamas. This angered me more than the constant spilling of innards at my feet and the spurting of green blood all over my head. Amazingly, I recovered from the odorous mess of sandman and made my way into the dawn at the seat of a freshly painted crimson formula 1 racer. I caught sight of a man who appeared to be in official Tire-changing clothes and asked him why I was in a formula 1 racer. I didn't like formula 1 racing in the first place. So he said sorry buddy, I guess we meant to put you at the pilots chair in an F-14D flying Tomcat. I quickly agreed to this profoundly astounding idea and amazingly found myself stepping down from the cockpit ladder into the snuggly-warm seat, decked out in a first class fighter pilot g-suit. After I took a quick tour of the Grand Canyon training canyons I decided it was time for action. So Then I amazingly found myself sliding at full speed down Mount Redi at Breckenridge, Colorado. Perfect conditions, awesome slopes this time of year. Talk about another rush, man. And then I decided to go sky diving, but then, amazingly, I woke up.

November

christmas blessings

25 days

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page 2

page 3 - nic's france haiku

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