babyface

i miss my sister. not a little, a lot. not perhaps the whole of my sister, i don't miss that, i miss phrases. Gooduus give it back! or, when i get mad, and walk around the house fuming those mother fu*&ing sons of god-damned - - ffuu&&**! and she giggles to herself and says: Goodduuuss you are SO rude! (and while i'm ashamedly apologizing to her she cuts me off) No! I LOVE IT HAHAHAH!! (and in a corner my mother shakes her head and scornfully says: you happy with yourself? you see what you've done to my baby? and Sahar (feeling protective of her brother: I'm his baby TOO!, you can't take all the credit you know!

last night, driving home, it occured to me, if nothing else... i'm happy to have been involved in this single person's life. i don't know about my contribution(s) to anyone else. to any other cause. to any other person's health or happiness. i suppose it can't be all bad, but still you never know how much you really do for any(one)thing. but i know what i've done, with my hands and lower back and patient discussions and angry rampages for my sister. and when she says: I'm his baby TOO! that's why he calls me baby DUH! i can't help but swell with pride. (and just this moment, simulatneously wither with distance, and elate with those unique precious memories that make a person not sad or notalgic, but soo unmeasurably happy and proud. the sorts of memories you want to die with so that you can say to yourself, as your final breath: yes! it was me! i was here! i did those things, and they were wonderful.

(and in my head i hear: Gooodduus you are soooo annoying!
- NO! You can't have a kiss whenever you want! NO!
- Goodduus you look soooo cool, like a rock star! (while my mom stands outside my door mumbing, oh my god, he's finally gay, oh dear lord why why why? you cannot leave the house looking like that you just can't can't can't)
(and i'm tempted to think of all those lines that will make me sad and crush me and break me, but i am going to avoid them, and end with the one i like hearing the bestest:
- Goddus, i love you! give me a big boos!

prayer (notapoem)

little today: you who are small(est); crumbs of time:
everything that is about you amounts to (almost) nothing,
and in sometime later i won't (can't) distinguish you from a
million others just like you. (one daffodil in a field of daffodils)

____you are the pinkytoe of something else altogether,
____which sometimes has(n't) a name (life?),

and i can't determine if you should be special or not. (or if i should)
(or if there are these-moments that are soo brave as to patiently hold up their end (Atlas)
until Great things happen).____(and if so when.where.how?

____please dear Lord (who cunningly has self-folded Great Himself into soo tinny-tiny
____small small, almost-nothing little today: please little origami crane of soo Big(gest) Yourself:
____under wednesday evening and/or fallen pretzels, or taunting jeers,
____lies something dear(est) to me. i call it me, and am unknowing how to discover it,
____or (in a field of daffodils) plant it.

only that little today was a kissless day.
(and love is something you find in the rain)
after it all, despite the glasses and the references to Herodotus,
i only know one thing:
________________(You)
(and am trying to use it to find only (unknown) one thing:

____________________________________________(me)

redemption song

i'm going to extremely regret this, pinkyhonor


it was like a first realization, almost a reminder; only that i couldn't at first recognize it. but i walked out the class, and said bye Adelaide, bye Newport (having deconstructed soo long, who people are matters little to me and their names and faces shift soo much anyway) and i looked up to a navy-blue sky. illuminated from underneath bye toxic yellow and from above with new-born stars... a magic carpet.
____and on the wind, for once, i heard nothing. i sensed nothing against my cheek- no pins, no locusts. no smell of farther beaches, no long-lost-ghost's lips. just... air. moving. from somewhere to somewhere. irrelevant wind: which is good for nothing but cooling my arms, and for flapping young women's dresses and hair, and for making so many beautiful things soo much more beautiful. and i thought to myself how beautiful it all was as i got into my car.
____slowly, in my chest, a growing depth. a heaviness. an expansion. a seismic swelling, but unlike those others, this was a new kind. light as a balloon. blurring the edges of the night as i walked into my front door. romantic, and gentle and kind and subtle. finally, it dawned on me what it must be... an almost indecipherable word. something i haven't said for a long long time. a forgiveness of soo many things. a clarity, a... gratitude. and i realized, maybe it's temporary, but it is here, right now, sitting besides me, a perfect conception of my life. a whole summary, a whole not-needed-explanation, the Great why? finally spelled-out for me. (the answer is: because!), it was appreciation. understanding. like landing on the other side of the fence, and finally understanding, and shouting: thankyou man-who-chased-me! thankyou for scaring me over this wall! and forgetting the bruises, the tears on phones, the angry trepidation, the homidical idealations, the yearnings that divided me, brutal chasms.
____and it's not even that i'm great. or wonderful. or particularly alive or anything so grandoise as that. but just that i am. another scrap amongst the ant-hill. and am loved in my own undeserving ways. and i do love. from breakfast to dawn i spend loving. from tree to tortoise, from blueberry muffin to ragamuffin friends to blue starry bends in the streaks of night: life is a tragedy that hurts because i love it. (and mostly, i miss the Shrine of Abdul'Baha. this quiet wind, this gentlest wind, this half-lit room, this unrequited desire to hug and be hugged, these are all things that were first born there. first found there. first made sense of there. first grasped and held in my hand for brief periods of time there. and brutal 2007, and equally brutal 2008, and those lonely afternoons (followed and preceded by other lonely afternoons) and those angry mornings (followed and preceded by the same) and all that lost, uninterpretable... that mess, oh how far it feels! how distant. how small and faraway and mythical and unsurmountable and how unmyself it all was. how unmyself, since myself (right now) smiles as he walks into a room. and the most beautiful girl ever ever was sitting at a computer and turned to see me walk past and her eyes lit up as though a flashing light had just crossed her. and tomorrow when i find her (and am less startled by her favorable eyes) i'll say to her something, and it will be equally small and irrelevant and only prove that everything dies back into itself so that it can be born as a second mis.lost.found.chance.
____but mostly:

__dear lord alleverything who makes breaks and shakes,
__who crafts days as tragedies, and tragedies as comedies, and smiles
__all hopelessness back into breathing tomorrow:
__who sinks ships to sleep in sandy blankets amongst pearls and coins,
__who makes my alleverything dry up and die so this monday night could be soo pleasant.

__tomorrow is for tomorrow, but tonight, i forgive you and every yesterday i could not bare.
__(even more:
______Q, i forgive you too)

ring the bell and run away; (a response to David); mikrokosmos; what my soul looks like

nothing's in focus and occasionally a bomb goes off in the lower right, pinkyhonor


____i. (introit)

she hears Bach being played
but can't decide from where. (and looks around to check again)
only that it's there. and wants to be heard.
__and makes even the sidewalk more beautiful.
she walks away, (knowing only that it exists


____ii. (alleverything)
kisses (first and last). the shape of jellyfish my father showed me in the aquarium when i was 9. the car accident i should have died in. falling: in . through . out of love (and the direction of all those arrows). (and falling asleep in your lap). (and crying myself to a i-hoped-an oblivion typing a novel so you'd remember i existed). (being ok with not existing).
___and Eman saying hi. and Monz saying i'm glad you got in and Martha saying it's ok baby and dreams of dead grandfathers, and hopes of white-bearded prophets sitting under sole trees patiently chewing on pomegranite seeds, waiting to see me as i return home. and hopefully, not being dissapointed.


____iii. (advertisement: lost and found)
too heavy to be lifted. indeterminate grasp of space, time, love, or gravity (but more-or-less compatible with said platforms). occasionally grows translucent, and slips through history when staring at the ocean. if laid on a bed of grass too long, seeps through and closes eyes trying to (re)grow roots. does not know nothing from nothing. drinks tea slowly, speaks only to hide and sits in silence when seeks. (and says what he seeks is (in) silence)

if yours, respond.

the game, or: self-improvement, also or: dreams of a recovering not.myself.ist

If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you.

____Oscar Wilde








book2_20, Jordi Gual Goodbye My Friends..!!


this is going to be a straight-up chat. it's been a while, so i thought i'd cut out the middle-man creative-writing mumbo-jumbo spectacularathon and just... say hey. hey.

some resolution with regards to personality:

____1. i've been listening to 'happy' music in the morning when i wake, and drive to school. (yesterday i discovered that if you drive through a parking lot listening to Bob Marley on full blast sucking on a rasberry slushie at 9am in a SMART car, women will find you unimaginably attractive and in one case, stop you to chat, and in a second, kinda chase you down a little). this little burst of happiness seems to kick me into my next point:

____2. i no longer look at the ground and frown when i walk (unless i'm deep in thought, which i try not to be). i look around. hold eye-contact, and though i can't actually smile at people, i am channeling all of my happy-vibes into a sort of Mona List half-smile that is neither flirtatious nor such an overt social symbol that people have clear interpretation rights. they kinda just get a sense of friendliness, which is the idea.

____3. i pathologically start conversations. 4, maybe 5 a day. if i'm in a line, i start it with whoever is behind me, or in front. in classes i sit next to people. yesterday i was walking and noticed a girl walking besides me at the same pace as me and in the same direction. either one of us has to slow down or we have to start talking. (she laughed) Generally my strong suite is older-women. i'm great with older-women. my weakness is guys my age. the conversation is almost always innane. cars. sports. attractive women. classes. [ukh]. i find as long as i'm forcing myself to speak start hello may i who how just say the first i'm not really able to relapse into a 'vastness of perpetual aloneness'. because, short-lived and virtual as they are, they are 1. contact, and 2. incredibly stimulating experiences. it forces a level of bravery, amiability, and caring that i usually have trouble mustering. that said, i am a fairly wonderful conversationalist and rounded enough to find something amusing to talk about with almost anyone.

____4. i sell myself instead of dread myself. i'm not homeless, i'm well travelled. i'm not a melancholic pessemist, i'm a facetious english-speaking french-existentialist (who believes in God). i don't miss hate decipher my past, i tell stories.

when in the morning (or by midafternoon, when) i notice everyone else sitting huddled in small groups, and me still rolling solo, i tell myself, you are selling lifestyle. you are not a you. you are a lifestyle. and your lifestyle is you. and i find that easier to fathom (believe it or not). because i don't need to ponder what a who.what.where.how? i am, i can just imagine a lifestyle i like, and embody it. i don't dress funny, i attract attention. and best of all, since i decide the lifestyle i'm selling, it can be the world i want it to be. a world of smart witty conversations, a world of loving frankness and honesty with a smile. a direct and simple world. a well-dressed, well-travelled, adventurous world. a world of being yourself (or at least having enough space to experiment with what a yourself is (or you want it to be)). in my world, it's cool to be you. drinker or not. Faithful or not. conventional or not. this makes it easier for me. i think of me as a representative of a space (a world) that exists, and which i am an ambassador of. and my demeanour recruits them into my space (world) (that exists) (only that i, more or less, am the only one from that planet) (at least within the present geographical locale).

____5. at the wedding: i danced. like an idiot. that's fine. let's do it again. let's do anything. i tried a new haircut today. didn't like it. went back to the old. i smiled, told the hairdresser sorry for wasting your time a bit, charge me a little more. i feel good about that in a huge way.

[what i'm saying is: i don't need to be happy, i need to act happy, and the being will eventually follow]

finally,
____6. when i was 13, i analysed. interactions. conversations. i looked for signs. i treated the social contract as a game. i used it to devise ways of mainting the interest level in myself (and in other people). i had routines for picking up lecturers (i'm using the language of the game, but what i really mean is: manufacturing, or assisting others in participating in, really interesting conversations)- set lines and questions and actions and feigned curiosity in order to stimulate comfort, discussion, and maintained interest. i stopped that when i decided i wanted to be a brazen, brash, jerk, rebel- i wanted to smash through social convention and just 'be myself'. now that i've resigned that idea entirely, i can go back to being... intelligent about social contact.

all in all, i've decided to use these last few (difficult) days, to investigate why i haven't been doing soo well socially, and to find a fix-it solutions.

my new general principle is: if you can't join them, make them join you.
(and i feel really comfortable with that idea)

________(mostly, thanks Mar for the chat)

Aaaahhhh. everything (why i cannot write)

____we will not be the last
____we will not be the last
____we will not be the last
____we will not be the last

________Bloc Party











untitled, [Brett Walker]

there is death. which falls out of the sky. which is counterintuitive, since i always imagined it sprouting from underneath our feet, like Easter Lilies around our ankles. like little clouds. and we slowly sink in. but, also, it can work the other way. falling from the sky like a rejected cloud falling thanks to the same-old gravity we all know by first name. spontaneous and free as just that: falling. (out) of the sky. something just landing on our doorstep (and that something is not being). and if people wanna keep falling dead out of the sky, i don't know how if i concentrate on what's in front of me.
________(and for all the things that might fall, ducks, and Zeus's lightnight bolts, and hail, i don't think there could have been a brighter star to have been extinguished than Khash Khatami)

then there is black water. it is everywhere, can't you see it? it's there. when i drive (day and night), i see it slowly creeping from the edge of the roads so i feel like there are river banks everywhere who suddenly seek my company. (a coldness to it too, and i sleep shirtless and wake every morning when for an hour it gets cold enough to warrant something other). you just need to be loved. by everyone. all the time. that's your problem. (who left that window open?) (you need to stop peaking in. it takes all the fun out of me when you know everything well in advance) and the thing is q, it's ok to just be yourself. i don't know who's convinsed you that you isn't enough, but it is. it's more than enough. (and the problem with not remembering who you are.were.want to be, is that all the other options don't quite fit right in your skin and there are sharper little bits that stick out and baggy sags as well. and if i morph another couple of times i'll lose it for sure, and will be autumn without the leaves and winter with a cold, relentless, austere sun (like an old woman's face, white and chiseled and unforgiving), and summer without the sound of the ocean, and spring without a single carnation or daisy and not a man blowing his nose from hayfever anywhere to be found. it will be damnation.

(what i'm trying to say is:
i'm freaking out a bit. it doesn't look, smell or fewl like 2007. nothing about it. it flows nicely. people are falling out of the sky. in 2007 they sank slowly till they suffocated. now they just fall and cuts are sharp and swift. that's fine. also, it flows nicely (did i just say that?). i am happy amongst myself and look forward to empty rooms and am half-tempted to just turn my phone off and disconnect my internet to preserve the littleness of me-ness i've finally discovered living in a quiet space somewhere inside myself. (a part of me i haven't tarnished beyond repair, he's an old man, living silently in a cave where he'd hoped to get past these last years undetected. i've found him and am slowly re-learning his language. asking him to inform me how it was things were. who it was i used to be. and how to do that again.

of course i did something 'naughty' the other day and everyone presently hates me. they'll get over it. (07's and 08's are sending ghosts back. terminator's from another time. these are wishing wells with very strong grips. i need to navigate it away from myself. i need to navigate sadness and paranoia and all those yesterdays that do. not. exist. anymore. away from myself. i need to charter busses and jets and rafts that cross dark rivers, and load all the old me's onto them, all the old names, memory, faces, books, ideas, bad-Q! bad-Q!, substances, airless windowless rooms, hatred, fear, self-loathing, history, all me, all 2008, all 2007, they need to be expelled. absolved. abrogated.

nothing i find, no tree or Bacardi or patch of skin (soft soft soft) is going to repatriate me. i am home, but blind. (not: homeless and sightful). i am inverted. upside down. backasswards. retrograde. differentiated. recast. tarnished and sullied by the unfortunate happening of life.

this last week, this weekend, the wedding- and all those hearts beating together in one room, on dancefloors, holding each other, and sitting besides each other at tables, and my friend dying inexplicably (the one heart that stopped beating)... everything i love and hate about life. side by side. as usual. the god i hate, and the God i love. the life i loathe. and the life that fills me with Wonder and Inspiration, and a will to wake up. the q that can't stand on his own feet (yet). and can't manage excitement without breaking something (and just so you know, i was naughty, and no one's talking to me at present), and the Q that knows nothing but love. and friendship, and can't wait to be himself, because he wants to know what words his future.babies will mispronounce so he can giggle and not-correct them and fill a notebook with them (and sit in bed at night wondering how best to phonetically transcribe their too.gorgeous sounds) and fill tape recorders with them so he can montage them into a video, and if i die, just in case, here's what i want you all to know, (just in case), (when healthy 28-year-old's heart's start failing randomly in the evening, who knows what could happen) ... (during my
jog yesterday i was covered in the sweat of fear. any moment now. for no reason at all. it could. it did. maybe it could did again)


____1. in between prayers, there must be music. nclude: the slow movement of Ravel's Piano concerto in G, Part's Spiegel im Spiegel, Thomas Tallis's O Salutaris hostia, and two Bach minuets from Anna Magdelena's notebook, g minor and d minor. played in full. i don't care if people are bored, they need to hear these things once in their life.

____(make sure at least one prayer for Praise and Gratitude is said)

____2. if my mom and sister are unhappy, tell them i've never been soo happy in all my non.life. also, tell them: i win!

____3. dress to impress fools.

____4. no speeches. no obituary. (but maybe read Tennyson's Ulysses... or, here read this (and make sure someone who knows how to read Cummings reads it. If Anjie's there give it to her):

________i thank You God for most this amazing
________day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
________and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
________which is natural which is infinite which is yes

________(i who have died am alive again today,
________and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth
________day of life and love and wings:and of the gay
________great happening illimitably earth)

________how should tasting touching hearing seeing
________breathing any--lifted from the no
________of all nothing--human merely being
________doubt unimaginable You?

________(now the ears of my ears awake and
________now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

(and that makes me smiley enough to manage the rest of my reading in preparation for my Contracts tutorial)

Thursday, January 15th, 2009

All Thursdays maybe speak today's language,
the sun that arranges itself like long peeled lemon rinds
___between our feet and across our tables in jagged shapes,
and the wind stands up for itself only silently,
___in gentle sign-language telling my skin "it'll be ok,
___and summer is here, but can't do too much harm long as i am".
Terracotta tiles motionless like oranges in trees marked in place,
table-tops and the skin of women passing radiate a different warmth,
that of a thing alive.
_______like, finally, me.

protrait & letter. (to q). (on his birthday)

That's what it is, a sigh of sleeping giantness

That causes turbulence even in the shy, still unused fields
Stacked to the horizon, not even waiting, secure

In their inertia. A force erupting so violently
We can't witness any of it. Best to leave it alone

And start it all over again, if there's a beginning.
The stalk is withered dry, my love, so will our heart decay.

Unless we omitted something. And we did. It'll cure it.
It will have to. But I can't whisper that story yet.

_________________________________________________________________from Forgotten Song, John Ashberry



PORTRAIT.

you are everything they forgot to say you're not. you are the clown-show and the massacre and the carnival and the funeral march. you are heavy as lead and solid as clay and dark as wet tree trunks and caustic and biting as the Prague snow creeping its way from your toes up your ankles. you are the dreams your father had of you when you were nothing but an idea, and before that, you are the first lines of the dreams god had of you when you weren't even an idea yet. when you were completely you, formed as a cloud and imbibed into air and rain and god took you and passed light through you and your lips were the red of a rainbow. and half the time your heart is still the blue of the sky.

you are errors in the sequence of time, you drag it down and slow it and speed it up and throw it back around on itself so it spins in loops like when you played with glowing sticks from the campfire as a child. (when you threw every object you could find into the fire to watch it burn into different shapes and shades of red and white and grew sick from the fumes). everynight you disrobe yourself back into your constituent memories. your history is the parchment of your skin. your eyes say more than enough. your mouth is useless, a vessel you use to hide and distract. you never catch anyone staring at your hands and that makes you sad. and all things make you sad, so you build dams and bridges to navigate your sadness away from itself.

you think making love is the same as listening to music, alone, late at night, since love is love and when made right: is invisible to eye and body (since skin merging with skin is how souls embody one another). everything you hope for is made of love. or combined to form it. or taken apart to reveal it, growing, softly and tenderly, like a pure white root the color of an easter lilly.

and when all those dreams made of history slowly grew arms and legs and teeth and spoke their first words (which dad says were: what's this?), and grew to hate and love and fear and aspire to sublimity, aspire to weightlessness, and grew deep as fractal geometry, when age encountered its own division, time amongst time gives time and time remains still more, always leftover seconds that could have been something they're not and never are going to be (and Martha says this to me and i never tire of hearing it, say it again, say it always: it could never have been anything else. it could never have been anything else), when that happened, we played the roles we played. we played lover. and friend. and passionate lover. and devoted son. and mourning brother. and we played helper, and we played helped. we cried on phones and we held hands. we issued warnings and we took walks and we stared at snow and wondered about the whiteness of the place we came from when we were dream inchoate. when we were so pure as to not have ideas and dreams and hopes and slept peacefully in our insubstantiate oblivion. when i slept as nonexistence how sweet i was. how silent, and how gorgeous. how peaceful. with eyelashes made of others' lives.

and you wrote words of it. a journal of time. a time machine to remind you of birds on wires and the color of women's backs that you kissed, and through the open window it was all moonlight and dark night and in the streetlights said farewell to. and you wrote of it to escape it and found it there, holding a box full of itself (wrapped in time, delicious and assiduously present).

you see yourself as flesh and connective tissue. as wrangled dream and potential energy (plates suspended mid air, always liable to fall, and for all its cracks, still held together). you see yourself as drifting through gravity's delicate web. you see yourself as responsible and victim. you see yourself at the center of everything. you are the flower and the daydream. you are the genocide and the corn-stalk. you are the sound of train and the refraction of light. you are everything Bach hoped for in a listener, and everything god hates to see in a man. you are all boy and no man. and all geriatric and no child. and all juvnile and not a tooth of wisdom to you. and you are all story, all fable, a whole mythology condensed into the shape of yourself. your shadow is soo black it redefines color. you are the sort of miracle no one notices.

you are pain and redemption to all who know you. you are agitation and vexation and you argue over nothing and are nothing and mean nothing, and yet, somehow, still managed to pull together enough carbon to exist. you are a tree that lost its herd. and you bide your time, till to the soil you return, relearning how to transform your two hands back into roots of lillies, and your teeth the blossoms of cherries, and your eyes into fields of snow broken hearted lovers will cry in.

life is just moving from dream to history. (and all in between must only be love or circumstance)


LETTER.

dear q,

dear new man made of old man. dear childish man. dear unlearning man. dear constantly mistaking man. dear forgetting relearning always remembering man. dear too fully loving apathetic not certain up from down man. dear man who misses all the things he remembers to miss.

in two hours you will be born again. newest again. unmistaken as the 26th you. the pinnacle of you yet achieved. the best we've ever had. the most hammered and bandaged you we've ever seen. the born-again. the resurrected. you are the son of you. the father of you. you con.trans.substantiate yourself. the heamaphrodite you.

i haven't a clue who you want to be as 26q. i know you have your ideas. i know you want to develop a certain weightlessness. a certain unencumberedness. i know you plan on filling voids. i know you plan to releiving yourself of godfulness. i know you plan on finally grasping the sharpness of your eyes. i know you plan on evening out the knives of your temper. i know you want to make love, to books and ideas and poems and people. i know you miss the smell of women's hair and their weight lying besides you. i know you think driving fast with the windows down is as close to flying as you will get. i know you sense your own newness. i know you can't notice your frowns and your cut hands and the skin you burnt last week has all peeled away now.

i wish you luck old new young man. i wish you antigravity. and volition. i wish you immersion in your own skin. i wish you embodiment in your own skin. i hope you are you to the fullest of your capacity. i hope you are you in the clearest and most precise way. i hope you speak like you and walk like you and pray like you and move like you and even, when no one is looking, dance like you in ways you've never managed before. i hope you can divide by smaller numbers and approximate to more digits who it is you were meant to be. i hope you can climb the mountains you've made inside your chest, and i hope you can bury the fingertips and liptips and hairtips of the things you blame yourself for. i hope you redeem all the debts you think you owe. i hope you find grass. and flawlessly blue skies. i hope the sound of the ocean stops frightening you. i hope you sleep long, impregnable black sleeps. dreamless sleeps. unfettered youness.

dearest q...

i want you to fade into black. (and be indistinguishable from the passage of time. and memory. and mostly, i want you to be love incarnate.

much love always.
q.

things related to this photograph (fragments)

courtesy ghetto blaster

POSSIBLE TITLES FOR THIS PHOTO:

____- you're late
____- things that happened outside my window while i stayed in bed because i had nothing to do on sunday morning
____- fall autumn fall
____- where you are and i'm not
____- slow, silent;
____- promises i failed to keep
____- i remember it because it rained that day
____- wonderland
____- the persistence of history
____- four invisible figures and the bus is on time
____- please god, please
____- we are also what we have lost

STORIES INVENTED TO EXPLAIN SAID PHOTOGRAPH:


____i.
and we'll meet
yes we'll meet
there, we'll meet there
yes, there. exactly
right.
and when we do-
________when we do everything will be alright.
all. right.
right; like drawers that slide nicely on their rails.
are we really gonna do this?
we already have. this is the way we're remembering it.


____ii.
by my second year of university i was fully depressed. like an anachronistic vitelloni i sat everyday besides the plastic drop-sheet of the outdoor cafeteria, watching droplets of rain take aim at my face and get as close as the width of the plastic sheet. i drank hot chocolate and read. and wrote. and at the end of the day, all wet tables and chairs, and the color of the cement almost shiny, i'd be the last to leave. and i'd leave. and no one would have noticed either way. that's what it was. those were the times.


____iii.
it is your city now. completely. you have made it home and owned it and taken all those steps people take as life moves (forward). if it is a place i land one day, there will be no confusion: i was late. you did what you had to do. you got to the line, and won, and are the embodiment of happiness. i'm something that lurks in your past, and no doubt, you keep off to one side like soo many of your secrets. and when i walk, i'll keep my eyes planted to the ground in front of me, out of reverence.


____iv.
the water makes puddles and rivers of everything. it is genesis everyday for ants and ladybugs. colors are different, and the sky exhales an ocean. whole futures are made in moments like these. silently. during quiet afternoons. in private little rooms, with second-hand furnishings and too many clothes on the ground. people's lives exist in those spaces. and as time decidedly moves forward, the people in those spaces are reduced to phantasms and ghosts and memories and back into solid shapes and end in words without meaning all at once. futures lost and found that we'll never even look up to notice.

Things That Make It Ok, a List:

____1. heaven is most memorable at night. and when it rains,
________there, (that place), castles of sound and exhaled humidity,
________is a home i can live with. in. amongst. am.

____2. and a freshly washed car, driving too fast, music too loud, heaters on and windows down and windows up and heaters down and wind real and imaginary, and the fluid feel of highways and sharp turns and the girl from MacDonalds who smiles at me and everything that goes into forgetting time and place and selfdom for a few moments

____3. my wall stands proud. my baby i call it. all throughout i would say see my baby growing? everytime a new row was placed. and i could feel it digging into the 50 or so tonnes of dirt it holds back. i made Atlas's back. two kinks, his vertebra. does it make me more man if i have built a wall? perhaps not. (but it does help with my longstanding gender issues)

____4. tomorrow (today actually, it's passed midnight) a new(est) future begins. a new me. i am bloodthirsty for the future. challenging it. taunting it.

____5. the new(est) Q. it's nice to be a new man. with untested limits, unexpected reactions, surprising moments of tenderness and wisdom and frustration. from within i am learning who this new man is.

____6. martha's prints have now been reframed. they look the way i always wanted them to look. they hang besides my bookshelf. it is a nook. it is my (current) favorite place in the world.

____7. "you know, i'm starting to love this house."
"yeah?"
"yeah."
"what's changed?"
"i know the floors better than anyone. everywhere it's not perfect... the hollow spots, the perfect angles, the chipped corners. i know the sliding door got flipped. i know which screws are threaded and if anyone tries to remove them they're in for a heck of a ride. i know this house like an anatomist."
"does that make it a home?"
"it... just... might."
"that's good right?"
"i don't know. i won't know what to do with it."
"what does anyone do with a home?"
"they use it as a pivot."
"what does that mean?"
"i think it means i'm not falling anymore."

____8. mostly it's just this:

____i'm ready.
____bring it.
____(whatever it is)

Ways of Doing Irreperable Damage to Your Body, a List:

____1. challenge Mike Tyson to a 2 round hit-me-as-hard-as-you-can-athon.
____2. get married. get fat. get bald. pretend it's all good.
____3. develop and nurture a hearty drug addiction. if the crack cocaine doesn't manage to wear you out, eating insects and living under abandoned bridges ought to do the trick.
____4. become a hippie. the sandals will hurt your toes, the hemp clothes will give you rashes, the ideology will molest your mind- but mostly, the diet will morph you into a herbivorous barosaurus (an enormous plant eater with a tiny head)
____5. go to Haifa and eat anything at all. wait 4 months. you will now begin sprouting hair and growing bulbous masses out of every orifice.
____6. build the following retaining wall in 48 hours starting at 7am on a friday and ending at 10pm on a saturday:

















(thanks for your patience to everyone who hasn't gotten a text, email, or general response from me in a little while. i love you all. also i can't feel my hands or stand up straight. when i recover i'll hit ya'll back)

Lists

Originally uploaded by yosoylete

Places I Have Found Whilst Trying to Find My Way (Elsewhere) (In General) (help), A LIST:

____1. the Third Ear, Haifa Israel, (the best video store on planet earth)

____2. Marilyn, Adelaide Australia (a brothel. i thought it was a club)

____3. From Dusk Till Dawn, Adelaide Australia (also a brothel. i thought it was a club)

____4. 29, Brisbane Australia (also also a brothel. i had no idea what it was)

____5. Venice Beach, Los Angeles USA (i don't know where i was trying to get to)

Things.Words.Phrases I Use Too Much, A LIST:

____1. totally

____2. dude

____3. seriously hey. (also: seriously) (also: hey)

____4. that's what she said

____5. yo

____6. fu*&

____7. this is what we do

____8. ay Khoaddayyih buzorg (oh great/large Lord)

____9. big boos

____10. also

____11. shoot me in the face

____12. whatever

A Couple of Inanimate Objects I Have Loved (Effusively), & What Came Of Them, A LIST:

____1. 6th Grade, my Phenoix Suns basketball cap with the purple visor and black with white stripes top. it was my 11th birthday present. was stolen off my head as i boarded the train at Brighton Station on my way home from school one friday. i cried and was miserable. it had cost my parents $40 (an exorbitant price for my family at that time). they bought me a second one. i wore it till the colors faded all to brown, and lined with the salt of my recess lunchtime runaround sweat, and blurred dyes all mixing with one another. my father still has it and sometimes even wears it to my great embarrassment.

____2. the red and black backpack i brought with me to Haifa, with the perfect padding so that your back doesn't get sweaty even if you're walking around Bangkok in 38 degree weather with physically impossible humidity levels. continued to use until the main zip broke. still continued to use. the second zip broke. also one of the supports so that i could only hang it from one shoulder. still continued to use. finally discarded it. in my office where i could still see it everyday. finally discarded it in a bin. as a token of mourning used only plastic bags for the better part of 28 months i remained in Haifa.

Places in the World I Would Prefer To Live (Over the Gold Coast), A LIST:

____1. Islamabad

____2. New York

____3. Bangkok (even with the brick throwing anarchy)

____4. L.A.

____5. Paris

____6. a refugee camp in Darfur

____7. Fallujah

____8. the dining room of a vegan restaurant

____9. London (even though after 12 hours in London I'm ready to shoot myself in the face from loneliness)

____10. Haifa (or Tel Aviv)

____11. an ill-constructed igloo on a sheet of arctic ice that due to global warming (ie impending apocalyptic doom) will soon break away and float me off into oblivion

____12. Kashmir, Kosovo, Jerusalem, other highly contested patches of earthless land

____13. a decrepit cold war apartment block building with no heating with 15 other squatters around an almost aflame tin can in St. Petersburg during perpetual December

7 Overtures to 2009 (Mikrokosmos)

The Pythia on her rock seat
inhaling rot learned to recite
before Homer's age the very first
hexameters a human voiced.
Full of reek, dead dragon slouch,
the reptile on its rocky ledge,
the putrid serpent, was the true
inspirer of pure poetry.

____Tony Harrison






____i.
Mozart won't walk too slow.
an adagio is never an adagio;
he knew better than most
what happens when you roll to a stop.
so he rolls on,
and the stop paces besides him casually,
nodding slightly, and licking his lips
thinking of the meal the forthcoming
two coins will buy him.


____ii.
- new year's resolution?, you do them?
- yeah, i always have a bunch.
- what have you got then?, __this year
- __thought for ages, only came up with one.
- one isn't enough?
- it is.
- ...
- ...
- so?
- what is it?
- yeah.
- be someone else.
- what kind of resolution is that?
- ___the hardest kind.


____iii.
and today someone looks at me a while.
you been wearing glasses long?
i smile. no. kinda new. he nods,
tapping his hand on his knee to the song.
stares past the lake, where a fish leaps and is heard falling
back in, is it good to be home? as he stares sidelong past me
on not receiving an answer, looks at me kindly
as i assess the words good and home separately
and finally smile back. you know what, it's too long since...
but decide instead to cut to the chase: yeah, it is good.


____iv. (Monz & Mar... thanks for caring)
and news travels in stages.
thoughts to sound, or images.
tapping of keyboards, reflective smiles
selecting photos.
waves reaching shores. a slight lapping sound.
truth is truth, nothing stands still.

q, you ok?

(and wind ruffles sails
and hair, and you've seen it
on a screen, or divined it from the motion of clouds,
and at last leadheavy and permanent as an anchor
it reaches my belly.
not a word spoken about it,
just drifting thoughts, empty bottles, footsteps in sand,
drying seaweed, bruised wood,
the relics of memory, phantasms of all that ever can't be. (is)

yeah. fu&* it. i am.


____v.
this new thing.
wrapped.
made.

( me! )


____vi.
as i unpack my boxes. photographs. books. pens. paper. clothes. i think back to two years ago. and how i didn't have the chance. all that had to happen to thwart these hands touching these objects for 724 days.
(this is the same song , ___in a new key.
(the same life, but a new me)

i stare at shapes, and wonder where i've been all this time


____vii.
and all that's left is past.
and all that's left is passed.
and all that's left is past.
and all that's left is passed.
and all that's left is past.
and all that's left is passed.

?)

quiet cities

shut up in her room, jordi gual goodbye my friends..!!


______i.
nothing more,
just ripples of it,
tides, dragging me out
___and puddles of night
___darker than the rest of it,


______ii.
and the ghosts whose patience
permits them to remain when all is quiet
at the risk of being heard gossiping
(the wind carries their noises a little
___(and the walls ruffle a little

sit in their translucent grievances,
dream a second life out of the first,
a russian doll set of oblivion,

and kick their feet in the blue water of the pool.

an abstract response to gol , the dynamics of [sigh]

____You'll learn to hate me
____But still call me baby
____Oh love
____So call me by my name

______Rob Pattinson













watching the wet dark, by Jordi Gual Goodbye my friends..!!

sooner or later, i'm going to have to come to terms with the fact that i will never have that yellow couch again. the couch i buy in the next fortnight will not be that same cozy, ridiculous, faded yellow. it will not suck you in when you lie on it so that for moments you disappear and live off yellow magic fumes and not air. i will not kiss those women on that couch. i will not sit besides mona and get excited about watching Slipknot concerts, or laughing myself into a frenzy watching Southpark, or falling asleep reading Flaubert while it rains outside. it will not be where i stumble to in the middle of the night when i wake up with an idea to write about. it will not be the safest place in known universe. the safest place in the known universe is exactly where i left it. in the first room on the right, through the double doors at 19 Hegafen St. in the port city of Haifa in Northern Israel. and i am very far away.

__(and maybe that's what death is. being very far away. a wholly new silence. the dark side of the moon. and if that's the case, then we die soo often while we are alive. and no one will ever spot at just which moment it happened. and how long it lasted. and when we came back, if it really is us that came back, or if it's... a newer us. or an older us. or a version of us who prefers to sit silently and let others talk. or who wants to be the center of attention. or has slightly different colored eyes that no one will notice)

locked into rooms by cloudmade walls, 9 stories high off the ground, or double-doored rooms with fireplaces and yellow couches... the whole of history is just about houses and spaces and the sounds and stories that fill them.
________(i found another love letter today. i thought i had destroyed them all, but it seems not. this one i could not throw away. i read it, dropped it to the ground, and realized the moment was too finely directed because No Aphrodisiac ended just then and there was nothing but silence. me sitting on a bright blue park bench i have in my room, and a little card on the wooden floor by my feet.


WHAT DEAN IS THINKING
it is not you darling. you are you and you are fine and we are all ok. but where have i been while you have been living life?, and doing the things people do when they are alive?... work and love and play and make new friends and be excited about things, and sad about other things, and laugh and dress themselves and brush their teeth and complain about the price of movie tickets. while you have been doing that, where have i been? where have i been that has had no address... and no constancy so that i have stumbled awkwardly, my knees moving at jagged angles, into the lives of new friends, and then tripped up and rolled on, away, to other places. what is there to show for myself other than the taste of dirt, the grit of sand in my teeth when i sleep at night? it is not you i am sad for, i am sad for the life i wasn't able to make (for myself), or have (which i wanted). and all these messes and catastrophes i've taken and sanded the edges off and put back on shelves for other people, to clear myself just a little bit of space to work with, and for whatever reason, i feel a deadline has been reached and i wasn't prepared to hand in my work. that's what the feeling is. of being late. of being left behind. of being redundant and obsolete. and useless. that's the feeling. and there is no sense to it. no sense to these comparisons, because we are what we are, and we do what we do, and it's always different and yet always the same in one way or another, and... there you go now. farther away. farthest away. space and time and circumstance. we bid you farewell. a final, unquiet silent sort of farewell. a most brutal internal farewell. a kind that is said and not heard. and not answered. and not even known was said, and no one ever knows what is.was felt,

(the saddest part of all)

*__*__*

time: you fu*&er.

*__*__*

and here my calender says a newest year has begun. i sniff and touch the walls of my room. i can't sense anything's different. i go back to my bed, lie down in the fetal position, and listen to the thunder outside. waiting for whatever's next to collide with me. life is the longest collision course that i know of.

much love gol
q