The claw touches the cloth that touches the skin, I skim, the attic of a house down the street exploded yesterday

My cats have always just cut my hand or arm, and whenever I open the window they jump on the desk and walk over the keyboard to put their paws on the sill. They are getting big. I feel proud about my growing cats. They are roughly equal in size. But Chiefrunningtears may be a little bit bigger than Crowbar.

I have odd reading habits. I don't read many things all the way through. There are only a few books I have been able to read from start to finish. Most of the time I pick up a book at start at a page near the front. I page through the book reading one or two words in different paragraphs. I do this until I find something that catches my interest. I read that for a while. Eventually, with some books, I get a good idea of the whole book over a long period of time. It is out of order, but it generally makes sense. Other time I will read chunks in a book, ten to twenty pages in a row. This makes me better at reading poetry than reading novels. I enjoy the short form. Even when it is a long poem, I feel like the poem is a short form. When I write novel parts or stories I focus on the narrative development, when I write poems I focus line by line. I think the way I write deeply reflects the way I read.

Now that I live alone there is alot of pattern in my life. I see alot of the same things everyday, with little variation. This leads me to repeat alot of images in poems. There is variation, but alot of times the reader is left reading basically the same thing over and over. I think that the repeating action is basic and needed in the long poem.

I still believe in the long poem. This is related to my reading style. I like to have many more words than I need so I can scan around and find things out of the everything that is going on. This makes a long poem something that provides endless shorter poems. The over arching structure is found eventually. I think of this reading as a kind of bathroom style reading where there is limited time, and complete focus for that limited time. In a collection of shorter poems there is an awareness of the poem as a complete object. I feel the writer writing or crafting the poem, starting it - going through some action - and finishing it. The long poem lacks these distractions to me, and the result is a more free-form writing that loses focus and narrative arc. In a short poem there is room for one to a few emotional shifts with minimal development. The long poem offers a landscape where subtle emotional nuances flux in and out of the fabric of the poem. The poem becomes a dynamic representation of the flux of emotion. I don't believe in stream-of-consciousness. I think a writer gathers methods of association, more and more the longer they write. Over time, these methods become subconscious and they form the phrases before the writer has to think of how the phrases are being arranged. Accumulating associations becomes a long-term goal, like the long poem.

My cats ate all the dry food in the bowl. There isn't anything left. Chief is sleeping in the sink and Crowbar is laying on a black chair. There are little punctures where the claws have been in the chair before. The light on the cieling of my room stopped working. I only used it for a few months. The yard is clean though, and there is only one garbage bag in the trash can.