Lay Down Your Arms

the first immediate problem, or at least, the one that's most visible to the clothed eye is a dichotomous schism thing that I'm feeling these days: a very light feeling of hopefulness (like vast cavities of space and time and circumstance opening up inside me, and also outside me, so that world could actually have things in it I don't know about yet... which is a truism, but I don't often feel this way), and a terrible brutal hatred of all that's come before (the vast caverns of coiled up, tortuous highways and byways and chanceways and wronglanes that clog up the greater part of my insides so that my chest is always heavy with past-tense and my lips can grow soo sad soo fast and my eyes disturb me with the things they fail to concede... the heavy weight of myself atop myself, choking me, like Jerusalem, city after city after city built on the same ground so that one can't tell corpse bones from kitchen sinks. In other words, I can't completely lose myself in this (though to a certain extent, I really want to), I'm held in place by a thick string of history. a conscious awareness of all i've wasted, lost, gained, had to go through, lose, give up, give in, give away, to get here (if here is a place that's worth being or not i still don't know).

the second immediate problem (if it's second it's not immediate, i know this, but it's a kinda uber-literary humor thingee) is this freaking annoying song: Lay Down Your Arms. Wanting to be a new man begins with wanting new music. Bon Iver, the Bug, Fleet Foxes, some recent dance music... I was doing well. but it's not esoteric enough. Being the genius that I am, I found a way to crack myspace with safari, and got busy clicking around trying to find the greatest song ever ever to inspire a new century of me-ness (anyone who thinks I am less than a hundred years old doesn't me). Of course I found a few things. Strange things mostly, a band called Bodies of Water that sound like happy Christians (men and women both) singing and clapping and dancing around one of those old-skool surfer V-dubs. But the real mouse-trap of the night came courtesy of one of those soft-spoken, no-need-to-shave man-boys who called himself: Flowers From the Man Who Shot Your Cousin. The song is a lovesong (of sorts) (also, it's an anatomy lesson because it mostly goes through the parts of a woman he'd like to touch: your ankles, your knees, your shoulder, your back). It is infective. I haven't been so sick with a song since Final Fantasy did a charming cover of the Stars' (as Anjie pointed out more than a year ago: the band is Canadian) Your Ex-Lover is Dead. (now that bastard of a song drove me, and probably Gol just about out of our minds). In any case.

I'm currently trapped midcenter of a complicated confluence. Today, in various boxes I found different things: a CD Monz had sent me last year titled 'Truths (at dawn)', which I sat down and listened to. Any number of love-letters that I found easier than expected to dispose of, though the leitmotif my heart which is the preferred closing statement will stay with me too long. Photographs of Martha straightening my hair. Pics of V that I had packed 4 years ago and took to Haifa with me and pinned to the walls of every single one of my rooms. A book called Conversations with Great Composers - Mr D and I spent an entire afternoon in the studio, me reading aloud while he painted and nodded furiously. "more, more". "you sure dude? i've been reading for like an hour" "more, just read the whole chapter, it's fascinating don't you think?" (he's referring to the conversation with Brahms) "it's incredible- it really is" "good. so keep reading" Photographs of too many ghosts i one day knew and i'm saddened to think if they saw me now they wouldn't know me.

This probably isn't a very interesting post is it?

i don't know what to say guys. i really don't. how does it all happen? this freaking song! it cracks me in half so all my themes come spilling out:

____- time (and all its variations and changes of velocity)
____- love (and all its permutations, tricks, sly smiles)
____- gravity (and all we have to lose, find, discover, destroy, in order to be led (lead the way) to whatever it is the final point is

and that's who i am i guess. the trinity. i am my inabiliy to fathom myself. my inability to contest happening from happening. (it just happens!, i don't know how, or where from... )

mostly,

______ __*__*
________^_ _^^
________**___**

(she leans towards me, i know she wants to kiss, but i hadn't counted on her making the move. magnets decide these things, no one's really in control- lips lead to lips the same way palms lead to palms. rudimentary physics. join like clasped hands. ___after it's done, i think, how rare it is, something that never existed now does- a whole trajectory, a new byway, a new universe bred into the buds of the hush that comes over kissers. the grass is now a different shape. the sky has a new weight. was your hair always that color? all this, hidden inside the soft sound of lips (like holding an orange segment lightly in your fingertips).
___she wants to move away, i sense that, but i don't want her to. she rests her forehead against mine, so her mouth moves away from me, our noses are spooning. i smile. she's feeling shy, sensing the new universe we now live in, if it's any better than the last ones she's known. i lift my hand out from wherever it's been hiding behind me, slip it past the veil her hair makes, falling over her face, partially pulling it aside in one move and resting my hand against her head, her ear between my thumb and forefinger. i pull her mouth back to mine. it's dark again because i have my eyes closed again. where are we? i say in an unintelligible language i'm sure she can hear with whatever organ conceives these moments. wherever we are... it's never been found before.