also, two weeks with little to no sleep. although i lack hard evidence, i blame mccain. home from work at five, i undress, grab a beer from the fridge & watch exactly 50 minutes of news tv then fume all evening. not even a cigarette after months of no cigarettes can calm me. i leave nasty notes on every suv i see with a mccain sticker plastered to the bumper. it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. three days ago a friend from highschool messaged me on facebook wow you’ve changed! the last time i talked to him he was entering his first year of seminary & informed me over fajitas at el azteca that he was voting for bush in the re-election. sorry liz but i just can’t vote for a candidate that supports abortion. what’s worse is he supports mccain! god, palin’s a babe. in my insomnia rage, i emailed him at three am this morning: wow! you haven’t changed at all then proceeded to list, in about fifteen bullet points, exactly how i felt about him & his "moral covictions." in addition i have unplugged the tv & banned myself from reading anymore on-line articles that begin racial bias might play a bigger role than expected.

the entire left wall of the living room is glass, pushed back by a mammoth spanish oak. open the window: manic green floods the carpet, flypapers the walls, which are still bare, save the green, the stuff of summer in decline. tell me, please, if there is a way to revert back to rage; degrade this silence into such a state of incoherency, violence is possible. true violence can only occur in broad daylight. i want to be watched. if after twilight—is only terror, the basest form, all reverberation. i seek the purity of present-tense. and fail. the formality of my silence, of “healing”—smoothing my skirt as i sit; the sun, skin light with it. mom calls: in january, the rose bowl. do you know where they keep the floats? my sister: i tried sixteen different wedding dresses; they all made me look fat. the formality, even, of despair. i sweat without producing a scent or any identifiable moisture. i wait every day for the sun to reach high noon: a drunk and stumbling yellow, at the height of its virility, bleaches out the leaves, chapped concrete, light itself.