4 de Marzo

And on the day before my 31st birthday I read Alejandra in bed. I also read Frank O’Hara for whatever it’s worth. I tried my best to stay occupied so I settled in on the small breeze tracing my backside and left my phone to die.

Soon I’ll be with friends. Michael is coming in from LA; I’ll meet up with him and a few others in a few hours. We’ll rooftop to dance out this hangover and replace it with a newer one. Then tomorrow we’ll picnic.

For my 31st birthday we are having a picnic in a sunflower garden. I couldn’t be more excited to be there, passing smiles between long beautiful yellow hands sprouting up from ground to watch us play baseball and dance. Oh nature’s sweet marmalade, brilliant and golden brown, which way will your sunflower-face face today.

I write here on bed in México, in a room I call my own. It’s been mine for about 8 months now and that’s real nice. It means something to me to sleep in warm worn sheet, to see my books there on floor collecting dust. I used to think dust was bad; that an unused, unmoved thing was bland; that not to change, meant to settle and to settle meant to drink hemlock. But than I saw how lovely those there black roses sat in haze of dust-bunny-kisses, draped over dried petals on top of Wyoming word; timely as ever in their own right. And so I’ve come to see that it can’t be all bad to sit still. That the very best grandpas have candle wax handling from their ears; that wax means wisdom. That oddly enough my partners took a liking to cleaning my ears and that that must mean that I too am growing old.

I realized all this in the afternoon hours before my 31st birthday, the final moments of 30, as the years of my youth, now memorialized on mom’s VHS tapes and old moleskins, too began collecting dust.

Francis
Ciudad de México, Marzo ’23