Letter to Bon Iver

This is not the sound of a new man or crispy realization

It's the sound of the unlocking and the lift away

Your love will be


______Bon Iver, Re: Stacks




Dear Bon,

have you proven, as a closing argument, what Bach and radiohead and Nina Simone had proven by way of exposition- that if cut the right way, crack-cocaine can be somehow ingratiated into music, concealed in the invisible wavelets of air vibrating, and sucked in through the ear. it must be that, i can't think of another explanation, not just for wanting to listen to you all the time, but the for feeling i get during.after listening. it's a... a heavy head, a feeling of dizziness. an inability to quite distinguish words, i'm heavy - my body too heavy a burden, i'm mixed and thrown against walls, i'm lost. to what? you are new to me, so i have not cast you into a mould with memories yet, so you bring up nothing from Nostalgia Lane, but you stir up un-named emotions, things that have lived in human hearts (Malouf: a darkness even the waters are not deep enough to hold) without a scientist finding them and naming them, like those giant squids that live forever ever underwater somewhere... the love-stories of pirates and Atlantis's mermaids and gold coins with curses. those unworded consequences that live as crispy dried-jasmine petals in prayers books, purple pieces of paper with handwriting (love's final heiroglphyic clue to me - i threw out all your love letters when i got home this last time), dusk and overcast days when it rains and i drive lost in tortuous grey roads that lead from nowhere to nowhere again, listening to you, not able to understand a word you say,
though in the dark enclaves of my fingertips, in the hollow caverns of my internal organs, the beasts of the sea, of the dark, of shadows and lightless creatures that have evolved eyeless and sightless and dreamless (but for black shadows and black pearls and black meals of black morsels of black nutrients of black men's black hearts) perturbed and finally spoken to stare back trying to discern the shape of things to come. ,
dear Bon, who are you to me?
what is this despaired high you've brought me to?, where i suck you up and fall against the corners of my days shaking and tired and unable to distinguish pain from pleasure (yet again), waiting for some event or occurance to forge you to. so that you can become: Bon Iver, the music of when x & y happened. Like... Damien Rice, O, the music of a train trip form Hamburg to Prague after only just recovering from a 5-day fever because you probably didn't love me; and the music is painted white with snow, and the black trees and electric lines lacerating gashes like stitch marks throughout my afternoon as i cried softly to myself and composed a 6 page letter i regret doing now- because i actually sent it.
What malady or victory or midlove afternoon is going to define you? What good winter of mine are you here to claim? Dear Bon, even your name is a metaphoral dichotomy. are you playing a Shakesperian joke on all of us? Now is the good winter of our good discontent? Are you feeding us black sightless pills that remind us of hollows within ourselves, and clogged arteries in my brain, my circle of Willis traffic-jammed nearly shut with thoughts of blue hatchback cars and girls with yellow eyes and open mouths and the soft purrs of love taken out of hearts and stapled to palms that to other palms can share, or to cheeks can transmit, or to lips or to eyelids? you cannot be the music of my past, you don't know about Adelaide. or, last night, when someone said to me:

so you're back?
yeah. i'm back.
to stay?
looks that way. [for now]
so it's home.
what?
home.
what is?
[um... awkward] um, ya know, like... home. __where is home?
home?...
yeah
___. has no meaning for me .
what?
the word; it means... nothing. it's a historical term.
[are you high?] what?
it means archeology, or geology or paleontology. [Adelaide, Haifa, Los Angeles... dead things, like Tutakhamon or Diomedes]
hey, that's my friend over there, i just have to go say hi to her.
[thank god. silence]

you are certainly the music of the present. the music of idealogical limbos. the music of crevices and flumes running on empty. the smell of cement warmed by car tires after it rains. the discomfort of quiet men dragged into noisy rooms. you are the music of my phantoms. an archived aural record of my regrets. a reminder of my failures. you are the music of the present, the homeless present, being constantly sapped by my own heavy sense of self-dom, or, again to borrow Malouf:

We are all of us exiles of one place
or another - even those
who never leave home.

or to recount myself:
where have you taken me? what astrology can disentangle this tortuous skein of life that i've made/been given/don't know what to do with? all this tangled skin (see there, between my toes, what a mess). you are a music of Gold Coast summers that are not warm at all. when it rains everyday, and is colored dark grey even when the sun finds gaps to assert itself. you are the music of lost highway drives, round-a-bouts and a life peopled by precisely one person: me. An insular compartment in a dashboard of the world, sitting in modest shadows counting lost and founds, wins and losts, and throwing away hours like wet newspapers, dreaming of red hairs and blue eyes and olive skins and middle fingers and laugh-out-louds and i'm so sorry babys, and will you be okay?s and two tickets to Pragues and my car's been towed.s and autumn on a magical wall in China and walking around Vienna kicking rocks, and walking (soo) sadly home from Brentwood listening to (Not) What You Wanted by Angus & Julia Stone which Monz gave to me not realizing how sad it would make me because it was the theme song for LA disowning me and sending me off and not wanting me to stay with her and her Venice Beaches and her 4pm omelettes and diners and her peak-hour napalm-scented traffic with the venemous red eyes of the BMW in front of you winking so often... you are the music of my alleverything,
you are a gross high that leaves me sickened and disgusted with history-future dread. i lick every stone for a taste of you. i tremble covered in sweat and lying on the floor kick my heel into the cement ground hoping to leave a mark somewhere for someone to know me, and jab every needle into my veins and snort every powder of you i can find. i ... i ...

this morning, with my eyes closed, i tried to recall the feeling of a warm body in a bed. i could recall hands through hair, and lips on eyelids... but i couldn't model the mixing of weights on beds. the changes in temperature, and sounds, and constant collision of limbs.

where does that leave us Bon?


This is not the sound of a new man or crispy realization

It's the sound of the unlocking and the lift away

Your love will be


well put. bastard.