untitled, .littlegirlblue
[note: this is a variation on i had a dream about you by Richard Siken. it was just such a wonderful construct, i had to try my hand at the form]
because there was is nothing to it you said and i said no. and so we didn't. but instead we lay back on the sand and it was freezing cold and the waves looked like smiles and it was soo dark just white teeth of convex smiles curving towards me over and over and over and over
and you said here is the sun if not the sun then at least a birthday present the sun once gave an eskimo little girl and i said maybe so, and i shrugged and we walked from somewhere to nowhere and back again and it was dark when we got there.
i thought about taking up smoking and your eyes turned into blue butterflies when you looked at me because that's what it looks like. the whole sky fluttered.
and i reclined on the white plastic beachchair thing by the swimming pool in the sun and my skin was gross like an old jaundiced too-skinny dog and listened to Mozart while the French girl lay there topless and brown and smoked cigarettes and i thought to you we should take that up and you thought back that maybe it was for later. and later came and later went and we rented videos and watched them on tiny laptop screens and sat up soo late at night thinking about nothing but that we were up soo late at night thinking about nothing but that we were up soo late at night thinking about (and you lay a hand on my shoulder and stopped me). (and i was thankful)
but the bustop is no place to be this time of night. that's true but we sat there anyway. the hoodlum boys smoked and the young girl with them laughed and out her mouth a real life scorn came into the world and the grass was a little bit darker. and you were soo beautiful you ran your eyes along the shadows for me and suddenly they all turned into massive petals of two-dimensional soo-sad flowers. it was a language i understood and could speak and so i huddled up against a wall (in my room with no windows) and i spoke to them and we laughed and laughed about the Future (and my forehead bruised from all the banging) and everyone thought that i was a madman but you said that i was yours and so i was happy enough with it.
finally, after i had caught the cloud that stole the line from off your palm, i chased the little bastard down and inhaled it all into my chest and coughed the line back up and you said it was y = mx + c which meant nothing to me, and then i took you around the waist and we danced andantino con moto while god played Debussy arabesques for us out of rain and thought we were silly and your dress was half the-known-world and the other half was your white back and i held all of nature in my arms for 3 minutes and 45 seconds and then
if you look at me like that i'll kiss you i said and you said oh really but gave me that look again and being a man of words (if not my word then at least others') and so i leaned in and put my hand behind your head and was lost in your lips and your hair and the yellow couch that probably never existed swallowed us whole line and sinker into the bottom of some other ocean where there was no gravity and it was ok for me to kiss your white breasts in the moonlight and your skin was coloured chalk and bone like making love to a ghost with too black hair and your eyes turned into moths the colour of fire and autumn and red-bricks when i woke up i was lost and hadn't eaten for six weeks and couldn't remember what my name sounded like when people said it i shook my head and said no that can't be it.
but these are the dreams we should have had. and the bus would roll on forever and we would sit and laugh and i would hold my book(s) in my hand unread because you were a better book to read and we would have for breakfast slurpies and french fries and a lunch of each other's tongues and get to third-base in dark room cinemas and when you got sad we would find fields of rainbows to run through so that our clothes were stained indigo and pick our favorite colours like candy-snakes and candy-rasberries and no one likes the dark licorice ones and when my grandfather died you would have saved me from the funeral and when the clocked tick you would have whispered to me to save me from the sound and at 4am when i couldn't sleep and wanted to vomit my 3am cereal back up you would have told me jokes about Chuck Norris and we would have found oceans to be our pets and daisies to be our destinies.
and then you said nothing. and you cried.
and the phone was hot in my hand.
and at the airport you gave me a book of Francis Bacon and it was too heavy but i took it with me anyway and looked at it a million times and saw your heavy hair and perfect breasts on every page and your toes which you'd never let me kiss.
and we walked around the desert and looked for sandstone heiroglyphics and the cats had one-eye. one-eyed pirate cats that rasped and fornicated in the night. and the streets smelled of magic and murder and mystery and sewage and dreams were covered in dust all hamseen season.
and our shoes are dirty with sand and the pockets of all every of my pants are full of sand and my bedsheets too and the saliva in my mouth is thick. and my hands are cold and i am medicated and feel a little lonely without even my brain to keep me company and at 4am i look at the shadows and they are not massive flower-petals or Egyptian papyrus fans.
and you cried unhappily.
and you smelled like heaven after your shower and you clasped your bra and i looked from the doorway and you called me a pervert and the light was milk and you said put this lotion on my legs and i rubbed your feet and kissed your toes. sadly.
and my hands are colder and colder and when i shake hellos i want to apologize and my god you are a dead man she says to me and i nod because it is a little truer.
she has freckles and blue eyes. then she laughs. c'mon, it's ok, and she pats my shoulder and her lips are the sort of thing wars are faught over. and i put my arm around her and say i may marry you in 2-4 years and she laughs.
what was dream what was life i cannot tell. and what was nightmare and what was dream i cannot tell. and i cannot spot loneliness from the other stuff and the other stuff from geraniums and all the colours are mixed up and when i last looked up i was 4 years old and my dad was showing me a huge spider and i was sitting on his lap and we watched thunderstorms and now i am cold handed and drug infected and i have no brain and my heart is kept on a leash and when i see pictures i fall into spaces that were not meant to be occupied where is the god if the madness is in everything and you said
ssshhh, sleep baby. sleep.
and i did.
falling out of heaven hurt a lot.
Friday, July 31, 2009
short-story
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
thoughts (fragments)
my shoes are still wet. and the sand sticks to them. and they sit on my carpet. and while i slept for a few hours they dried a little. and the sand fell off, unto my carpet. and the salty air of the beach evaporated into the air in my room. and a part of my dreams must have had foam and waves.
THINGS I WOULD WELCOME ANTHROPOMORPHING INTO, A LIST:
(the french girl packs her books to leave. the person in front of me takes her shoes off and wiggles her toes. women are soo gorgeous when they do that. she holds a bright-red book and reads a chapter titled Understanding International Mediation. the guy next to me, i played basketball with him once, he scrolls through legislation. the french girl has forgotten to take her ear-plugs out. they are flourescent orange, and make it hard to say hello to her.
she goes.
it's Thursday. whatever that means. and i wear the red sweater my grandfather gave me, it is my favorite. i haven't shaven in days and my eyes are a little dark around the edges. i feel very much myself, which is why i cannot study. why i notice women, and red-books with chapter titles. it is why i hear scrolling and tapping. it is why my heart beats irregularly, and i remember that music does more than keep the beat. it is why i itch to take a train till i get to the water and a boat till i get to the shore and a rocket till i get to the next place. it is why i feel like hugging. and sitting in secret patches of sunlight and tracing the lines on people's palms with my fingertips. why it's hard to breathe.
when this song ends i need to go pee. and fill up my water bottle. and take my pills. and then, all that will be left is the punctuation
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
2. When?*
*This question exists independently. I have rinsed the sand / licked the seaspray off the first question.
____tin
http://revolutionstartsathome.tumblr.com/ by L U C A
(just a thing. that is. over there. like... there. see it?, right).
when there is no more time room or patience for poetry, a person has nothing left to do but sit with a lamp on. close to his head. so that it warms the side of his ear a little.
__when that happens i can't decide-on what music to listen to. and i skip manically from song to song, unsatisfied with familiarity, or with newness. but god it is pleasant with the warmth on my ear.
when there is no time left, when you walk too fast and don't want to say hello. when there's no point, when it's just the last thing on the list- or the list is soo long and you don't know where to start- it's the same. just tasks. first this, then that. and after that, then this again. the night is a touch warmer. just a touch. not much, but it's sensible. yes yes. warmer skies are ahead. god help us.
but i don't care about that. don't care at all. i want to talk about the bottom of the well. or the grass at my ankles when i walk, i'm talking about when that happens, when there is no poetry left. when there is just what you see. what you say. what you can touch with your eyes. when things feel only good, or bad, and you have no better words for it than just that. (when you don't need better words for it than that, because those suffice just fine. no need for greater specificity than that. good. bad. let's go).
when it ends we are always soo sad. doesn't matter what the story is. makes no difference. i can't manage endings very well. i'm always the last man stumbling. the last man clapping. the last man loving. that's just how it goes. i'm an echo of a human. always a few steps behind everyone. maybe i just like to look at ass. just maybe.
the corollary that follows (naturally) (or not). (unnaturally), is that there is no ending that i know of. that nothing ends. that everything follows everything and causation is really just an Adam & Evie re-telling of all of everything going back to when i was a drip on a penis that found itself in a warm spot of tenderness and love and for just a few moments, happiness. maybe.
when we are mistaken, after about 24 years, we find we are mistaken in the most serious way- eff me silly, there are endings and there are things that end and end soo brutally, so unchangeably... i found it confusing. when it happened i couldn't fathom it. that it was an ending. like the last page of the Grapes of Wrath. like... welllll... what happens now? (now) it is not like life, which is an open parenthesis- (which starts and then mumbles along in a long chain of verbosity and reticence, one moment silence, another hilarity, but always groping it's way on.
not like that. i'm talking about the end. with a big spot at the end. when that happens, i never know what to do with it. i sit usually. and just feel it. try and grasp the scope of it. it is a thing with boundaries. with borders. in time. in circumstance. it is clear. four-sided. 10-sided. whatever. and yet, being such a concrete, solid object, still, still still still despite that, it is impossible to put in its place. to contemplate. that it could be such. so.
when it comes to this. to that... i don't ever know. no metaphor is useful. words are limp. inefficient. purposeless. a word on a page has never gotten me laid. never gotten me a job. never gotten me a friend. they just sit there, like oranges under trees. that sickly smell. when i walk amongst them, in the desert in Israel this is, it's summer already, and warm as a mutha-f*cker, it's in a garden, out in the middle of nowhere nowhere... i don't even want to kick them.
in times like these, where's poetry gonna get you? and if you don't have poetry in life what have you got? jeans? dirty shoes and empty tea-mugs with a darkbrown stain? the sound of yourself breathing under lamps. just... life. last man stumbling. the name of the month.
when it is december i change all my online statuses to 'a long december'. when it is april, i change them to 'april is the cruellest month', even when they are pleasant. but december is always long. and april is always cruel.
and when is not a story about time. or circumstance. it is not a proposition of certainty, or a challenge about validity. i'm not sure what it is, other than... the unfolding of pieces of paper. the recieving of letters. bills usually. sometimes junkmail. about meetings and goings and comings. in mouths and through mouths and on mouths. things people say. just... put it out there. things you nod to. things you just stare through. yeah, know whatchya mean.
when we are old, we will remember today better than we have lived it. and when we were young, we lived it better than we remember it. when we are nothing, we will make more noise. now that we are everything, we are soo silent. we are just silent eyes reading. silent fingers and silent flacid sexualities. we are tongues curling around each others' fingers in our mouths. when we are driving, or sleeping- what difference is there? when we are dreaming or gasping for air, when i have the hot-water too-hot and let it scald my skin a light pink and don't move and just clench my jaw like some masochistic masturbation called Tue 10:44pm- when do we get over that? when do we find a poetry that deserves to talk about geraniums and babyies lips and the softness of cats?
when can i be that again?
the last word should be obvious now. the answer to all the unquestions. the unabsolute truth. the only thing that (does)n't matter. the sigh at the end of the sentence it's not even a word it's almost just a sound not even a sound just some squiggles on a page no one i know of deserves to have wasted a second reading this just step back and go away now you know the ending the score is nil each team who gives a cares a sucks a, the last of the final of the conclusion summary of the unnothing uneverything is of course that
when,
Monday, July 27, 2009
hi, i'm a nihlist.
untitled, brett walker
i decided to write completely out of the blue. so i'm not ready. i don't know what to say. i have decided to use short sentences though. at first i wanted to use a picture of a woman's feet. because i find women's feet very attractive. (potentially). then i thought to use a picture of a woman. because i find whole-women very attractive (too). next i contemplated using something abstract. sometimes i do that because feelings are abstract and i am hoping to make some sort of visual connection to my writing. i admit it's probably lame. on the upside, i always think very highly of the images themselves. (even if i do not think too highly of the writing that follows). finally i settled on this portrait. like all of brett walker's portraits, it's not an image you can just walk away from. it has a gravitational pull. haunts you- even his happy images do. like staring at the sun, and then you close your eyes, and the image is burnt in. like that. that's what i mean.
also i wanted to write because i am avoiding Mon 10:43PM. there is just too much to read. it's not like i have anything better to do, it's just that, if i didn't have soo much to read, i'd probably have found something better to do. hey, by the way, hands up if you think you're in the cool-kids-group. i'm serious. like all the funky-hipster pics i put up- any of you guys actually look like that? do your lives live up to a sordid, debauched, acid-trip with large fries sort of thing? if so, send me a shout-out. i have things i'd like to ask you. (but then i notice Mon 10:47PM is still here).
i think when i grow-up i'd like to be an international cultural icon. if not that, then at least a black-pen connoissuer. every year we could have a black pen-off, and i could tell you which was the best. only black though, i think there's merit to specializing like that. (for the record pyjama pants that don't have pockets are useless. what do you do with tissues when you have a cold? exactly. or, when in the middle of the night you want to go get coffee, in your pyjamas, where do you put your keys and wallet? exactly pt 2. see what i'm saying. shame Calvin Klein, you are lame-o-saurus rex. biatch).
everyone is still mad at everyone. this is not a matter that worries me because i have chemical enhancing drugs that form a wall so that i am detached from the happenings of all around me and can therefore observe like a neutral bystander. people still get mad at me. i can't tell why, i don't really say much. i just sort of... read all the time. seems innocuous enough.
so, i thought we'd be getting jetpacks? no? oh. that's why i'm here, for the free-jetpack. are you telling me i wasted my time? right. can i have wings then? like an Archangel, that kind. big, real impressive ones. compensate for tha... ya know, other "thing". he he? no? ok. you suck. (we may be winged creatures, but those wings are tinsel). (that said i still die a little death of happiness everytime i see a little girl at the shopping mall wearing fairy wings). dear future babies: you can always wear your fairy wings, i don't mind.
oh gosh. are you guys waiting for me to make a point? no. not tonight. i'm a nihilist. yeah. true-story. i took it up about 90 minutes ago. decided it was just easier. that way i could renounce everything that's ever mattered to anyone who's ever lived and not really have to worry. sorry to waste your time. hey, check around the corner, i heard they're giving out free jet-packs. if you get one give them the finger cause they wouldn't give me one. am i being funny? like, is this some sort of joke? there's nothing to laugh at, nihlism is no laughing matter. in fact, i think i may have to never laugh again. hmm. that could take some practise. if you put your mind to it, anything's possible. (the woman in the picture... whatever happened to her, i'm trying to avoid that. sometimes i feel too close. no no. no big deal. but it's scary when you're overcome by just one pure emotion. most times you get them as a rattlebag of things. little bit of this, little bit of that. cocktail. 10% happiness, 20% guilt about feeling happy, 5% rebelliousness, 30% gratefulness, 5% reticence, and so on. those rare occasions, when you get 98% rage. or 93% love. that's an intense feeling. it's a drug. terrifies me). (also i'd like it to happen more often). (makes you feel like you exist- which is a matter that i question).
i'm doing pretty good about not being poetic. hurrah. it's in the nihlist code, i'm not allowed to use metaphors anymore. adjectives on the whole are dubious. i'm just going to speak in binary from now on.
Mon 11:02PM.
(dear god, it won't go away)
Sunday, July 26, 2009
love-song.
____all our secrets melt like ice
_______gravity, Bic Runga
untitled, tamara lichtenstein
in the other room there's talking and eating, noise.
here: dark but for one lamp. cold hands. green pens and quiet, concentrated reading.
distilled humanity: just single tasks.
breathing. looking right to left. turn a page. (left to right. breathe. turn page.
for once it feels real. objects stand erect in their place. last night's RedBull bottle where i left it.
___i cannot understand why people could be mad. and i'm shouted at, and i stare back with a confused face and say but what advantage is there, to you, in shouting at me? and i'm shouted at some more. and i keep looking... grasping inside my head, thinking what it is about table-cloths or the smell of vinegar or lunch-parties that could possibly be worth this. (and i'm shouted at some more).
but love is a 5mg tablet. a woman's naked body. a mouth reeking of rum, sticky around the lips. it is needle-points and smokey rooms. tolerance is a misplaced bottle away. and i want to feel concerned about this...
but there is a yellow notepad. soo beautiful. thin slices of sun. and the wordless roads i travel down, with my car, or my beat-shoes, or my confused frown... are ok with me. walls that let me lean, and seats that let me sit. and special friends who don't mind me soo much.
___but what is this sound?, how strange. how loud. how it makes everything red, fists clenched. i would do anything to make it stop.
and there's talk, in the other room. and guests come and smile. and angry faces smile back. and no one notices table-cloths. the smell of vinegar. (i'm convinsed love is confined to my chest. i feel it there soo strongly. it is tight a little and my hungs are too huge to fit. even with Sun 5:35PM. it is ok, it is ok, my love. even with myself. and my confused face.
no one notices table-cloths. the anger still sticking to the walls. fidgety hands. in another room no one notices me. how i'm eating silence. swimming in a puddle of shadows that don't intimidate me. i love the name of today. it's ok my love. it's ok. (remember that sound, to be just two people, and it sounds loud when you are together, every surface reverbeating, when i woke up in the morning i fumbled for my phone to call her, everything beautiful and loud like air rushing past, life moving a gajillion miles an hour- The sirens all fill this room till we both have to shout, like that. i don't even miss it, i just... enjoy the memory of it. feel it for this empty bottle of RedBull. and a pen. and a yellow-notepad. and Sun 5:40PM. these are my brothers. who take recourse in contented quiet. where things do not shout. we speak the language of trees. there is no anger, that is not something we know. something we need. my love, what advantage to it?
but it can't be escaped can it? how this is life, or has become life, i'll never understand. how it came to this. how anyeverything led to now. i never will. how patience comes in 5mg serves. in 10 second puffs of smoke. in Gucci handbags. another cup of coffee, i already see her hand trembling. she says she's cutting back, but still needs it. i nod. yesyes. no, i understand. if anyone understands it's me.
i'm sure this is me. i'm sure of it. i'm sure right now, in this quiet room, alone, away, a satellite in orbit, floating, this is soo much more me. happy with my shadow and my quiet and my cold hands. nothing more is needed. dear life, you have given me everything. i could not ask for more. (and outside my skin, away from me, around me, everyonething is angry and hurt and ravaged and seething and sharpening their teeth to bite into each others' necks.
i am soo in love i don't even miss it. my empty bed, i am enough even for her. my flaccid clothes, that limp on my skin, enough enough. my car that makes strange noises. my clear, clinical mind. this bottle of RedBull- it is all enough.
but words are redundant. etiologies- who cares. who cares how, we're all stuck here. (in our lonely sunday afternoons. in our arguments. in our pills and our magazines. in our singleness and our marriages. with our names and our addresses. our empty back accounts.
yell all you want.
___(it is ok my love, no-one will notice the table-cloth, and even so, what advantage is there in making your face look like that?
if only someone could understand that...
___we'd all be ok together.
Friday, July 24, 2009
self-portrait
untitled, sylvian-emmanuel .P
hi new people. friends. thirsty eyes. voyeurs. nosy gossips. the curious. misled, mistaken, misguided. the inspired. people who walk(ed) pass(t) me. prophets. the virgins. dreamers. the hopeless. models. smokers and smilers. the pierced. the underage. unhappy single-fathers and overweight single-mothers. hello. dear friends. brothers. like-minded phantoms. those out to get me. laughaholics and manic-depressives. romantics and drunks and those out for a good time. internet-dating enthusiasts, flower-arrangers, coffee-shop-notebook-scribblers, tight-pant wearers. how i love you all, hello hello. silent readers. faceless confessionaries. masturbators, computer-programmers and mixed-up sexualizers. i do- i swear i do- i do i do. 3am cereal eaters. literary allusion spotters. mismatching socks and pyjama wearers...
i wish i could see you. i wish i could look at your faces as you read me. stare back from the screen the way you stare at me. i wish, even, to stand behind you. look over your shoulders at your faces, and stare at your eyes move left-to-right and try and spot tightening lips or tightening hands or curling toes or excessive blinking. i wish! i wish i could shake your hands, each and everyone and say hello! hellohello! and look you up-and-down and comment on your shoes or your necklace or your baseball cap. and sit with you a moment. and smell you. wow, here you are, my goodness. how surreal right? and you laugh. Val(USA) and mm and ojkewin and T, or K- who is always two hours=manuscripts=leaps behind me. earthfireice and Juliet. whatever other nameless readers. momentary judgers. mental executioners. the offended, the moved. the bored and the confused. hello.
and you could ask me your questions: tell me how my story goes, or: no really, who are you?. and i could ask you my questions. where have you been? what did you learn there? between the two of us, or three, or twelve, have we left any shadow unturned? is there a miracle we have left unappreciated? and someone can say, "yes, has anyone commented on children's voices when they pray?" and here i can say unequivocally that: "this afternoon, driving away from the primary school, i considered it, and decided there is no more pleasant thing in all of life than the sound of children praying. none at all." and Monz will frown a little,
"let me get this right Q, you're saying, the sound of children praying is... more pleasant than women's breasts?" and i will surprise everyone, everyone including myself, when i sternly, and with great gravity say at last:
"... yes." at which point everyone will sit back in their seats. and ponder a moment. Martha will sip her tea and mumble 'about time'. Mona will scratch her forehead and be confused. unidentified reader from Glasgow will tick something of his/her list and nod silently. "... and what about kissing in the rain, has anyone considered that?" and we'll continue.
but here is the thing, here is what i've been thinking... is it... better or worser for me to say things about myself. like... real things. like, tangible things. ages and sexes and geographies and favorite thisses and thats? do people care if i am 19 or 26 or 31 years old? does anyone care if i live in Amsterdam or Minnesota or Brisbane or Jerusalem?
hi. i'm a penny for the old guy. i write this blog. i do this because Martha got sick of listening to me rant to her, and suggested it. i also do it because i like to write. also because i'm scared of not existing. also because i feel compelled to defragment life. words are too full of meaning, i want to unpack them. unpack the million meanings we've managed to cram into the word: please. or sssshhhh. or fine- that could be the anchor of an entire story. maybe a lifetime. a love-affair. a marriage could start.end.be redeemed.doomed because of the word fine. i have historical-personage-crushes on Virginia Woolf. Sapho. Oscar Wilde. Winston Churchill. Nina Simone. i am not famous. and probably never will be. i don't feel ordinary, but i probably am. this concerns me. i have a counsellor who informs me, the reason for this concern is that i have narcissistic personality disorder. i am not too sure about that. i have trouble conceptualizing: god, time, space, infinity, eternity, lust and loneliness (which i can't tell apart), memory and fantasy (which i can't tell apart), love (because it is too big a word to fit into 4 letters). i have no idea what it means to be human. this is something that seems important to work out. i'm working on it. (one word at a time). southpark is the funniest thing to have ever happened to the universe anywhere at anytime.
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
stream of underconsciousness
____You were
myself in another species, brute
blue, a bolt of lightning, maybe God.
Now all has been made plain
between us, the weights are equal, though the sky
tilts, and the sun
with a splash I do not hear breaks into
the dark. We are one at last. Assembled here
out of earth, water, air
to a love feast. You lie open
before me. I am ready.
Begin.
____from The Crab Feast, David Malouf
http://revolutionstartsathome.tumblr.com/ by L U C A
did you remember to pray? i scratch the back of my neck. unable to respond. does driving with my hands really tight around the steering wheel count?, i think it should, it feels like a prayer. i have no words left to respond with. no words at all. i'd like to give you a tulip, that would be the perfect response. soft. beautiful. silent. something that breathes even when i'm gone. a little bulb of happiness, like your lips. a silken miniature heart for you.
i am significantly affected. apart from i'm thin like a junkie and i look at myself in the mirror and cannot make sense of it, i am... drawn to silence. quiet. i like to sit in the sun, with eyes squinting, contemplating nothing. perfectly content- i find quiet corners and comfortable chairs, and drip like soapy car-wash water down the gutter till i do. and i read. i stare at my hands. i just listen. i am baffled by intensity, cannot make sense of it. where have you been?, we never see you anymore! i nod, here and there my friends. here and there. you look sad, are you sad?, we've never seen you soo... quiet! i nod, quite the contrary. contentment is a silent word. a solitary word. requires nothing but sand in shoes and clouds in hair. it does not understand 'being late'. it does not understand 'perming my hair' and '21st birthday' and 'football grand-final' and 'boyfriends and girlfriends'.
but did you remember to pray? and if that is a question i wonder if looking at the colours of people's eyes, really absorbing them counts. (to some extent i hate that life is a chemical-relay race. it gets really loud sometimes, and i'm suddenly late for every(nothing), and i start freaking that it's Thursday and i'm wearing a blue-shirt (oh no) and my green-pen's almost run out (end of the world) and i pass the baton to another hit, and go find a quiet place to sit to contemplate the nature of silence. silence is a vast vast, dynamic, endless thing. soo engaging. absorbing. you can swim in it. 2 x 5mg and all the bones and weeds of my silence are suddenly... there are angels locked in my closet, bones and weeds are beautiful hands, and, she looks back at me and her eyes are butterflies.
*___*___*
and do you dance? but for this the little-boy had no response. 'what about savannahs?' he thought to say, 'if you excuse me for not dancing, maybe instead we can make a rainbow the colours of the savannah'. she would probably not know what he meant. so in his head he thought: the gossamer of dandelions, scattered across the field like uncertain cloud-kisses; matte-gold from long reeds and weeds; hardened-dry brown from a single tree-trunk, gnarly as the joints of old men's fingertips; in the distance, on the horizon, the hue of timelessness; birds of paradise and their brazen, demanding stabs of colour...
there are not soo many birds anymore. and it bothers me sometimes that i don't see flowers or mushrooms growing naturally out of the ground. and is anybody actually in the mood for love?, because i'm happier with just... the smell of women, and touching their arms from time to time during conversations, and hugs hello and goodbye, and kissing on the beach.
[why can't i say anything that i mean?]
*___*___*
MINI-POEM
Yesteryear's sailors, our haphazard youth-
starsailors in airless stratospheres,
too far to fall if we weren't already.
& breached moonlight's mirror reflection, butterknife glare,
starlight's vulnerable plea,
failing our too-heavy responsibility to silence.
*___*___*
but the last thing to say is that, despite Thursday being nothing, meaning nothing. and despite my planet's being a tiny speck of illuminated dust floating in my grandparent's always dusty guest-room, the everything deaf-mute-universe with its always-silence and its nothing-but emptiness, despite that, despite_that:
___that universe is expanding. i imgine it at its frontier, a zillion tiny mouths biting darkness and silence and deaf-mute-nothing-but-emptiness further and further abroad into whatever else there is. like a thin membrane, the limit of all the nothing in the entire universe slowly expanding, eating other physics and digesting other periodic-tables and staring nebula-eyed and smiling sun-strokes into the growing future, and increasing its domain- its realm of spirituality. the all embracing inhalation. come, come into the lungs of this my universe, where we have an incomplete equation for gravity and love is its own exception to every rule. my universe is dust and gas and i have contributed nothing but a little black mouth, with dry lips.
the universe needs me to help expand its borders.
i am happy to help.
*___*___*
Alexithymia: a state of deficiency in understanding, processing, or describing emotions.
*___*___*
words come in and out of focus. my ability and inclination to use them varies. sometimes things are the colour of pomegranites, and i think of Akka. and its walls. and its busy markets where i felt claustrophobic. and pomegranite juice. i think of Shanghai. i think where my doppelganger is and if he likes it there. sometimes things are clear like geometry exercises from high-school textbooks. webs. tangents and chords and parallelograms. but there are the palm trees that line this street driving home- and at night, sometimes they are too dark to be seen. and the earth changes from night to day like a Giant stuck in an uncomfortable conversation shifting her weight from foot to foot, smiling with difficulty all the water on the earth towards and away her white-teethed moon.
words. and emotions too. emotions have boxes now. i can touch them and see them, like apples. here there is a pear. here a toothbrush. i finger them, and am curious. but they are not mine. nor do i understand what benefit they have. when i listen to my music loud, and it thumps and screeches and invokes that smiling, fanged rebellion in my capillary beds and muscle fibres, i feel my skin go cold as a snake. i see with my eyes everything red. delicious possibility. dangerous perhaps. somewhere inside the robot there is a leak. and if you put your mouth to it beautiful girl, we will burn something together-
___but then it's gone.
and i am sitting on a chair.
reading. underlining things with a green pen.
and i cannot tell time. or answer my phone when it rings.
how wonderful to be absorbed into walls and Thursdays at last.
i could not be more happy.
(the sweetest mandarin i have ever put back into the fruitbowl)
Thursday, July 16, 2009
vacuum.
Dash Snow, courtesy tv blog
it may not look like i am, but i am. collecting stories. listening. nodding. noting things. (his eyes get a little watery, at 2am he speaks loudly and his wide-eyes dart right and left and he talks about his father and the length and breadth of human lives and the pills that save us. drinks. women). i may be a terrible story-teller, i don't know, probably am. can't think-up an original story if it kills me- so i try and memorize yours. take them apart. fragments of my own conversations. threads of thought (even my own thoughts come like distant radio-signals. coming out from a depth of space, from behind some darkness inside me, deranged by static and sadness, this tinny message). there must be a gravity pulling it all together, all these scraps slowly coalescing into sentences and chapters and characters and... meaning.
and i can't think what meaning is if not just... anecdotes. bread crumbs from our days. eroded contexts. words severed from sentences, all i have left are little bits and pieces. ssshh just sleep baby, sleep (i don't need to remember anything else from that night, that's all i need. her voice saying that. that's the whole story right there). meaning huh? painted toe-nails. freckles. they come into the macdonald's barefoot. one has long-toes. dirty. they are beautiful these women. their dresses. and their long hair. and my eyes exhausted from not sleeping, sting. and meaning is just history. we all have our demons i offer him. yes! he concurs. eyes wide you're gorgeous he says to her and she smiles as she walks to order. barefoot. dress. hair. demons. history. ghosts. heavy ghosts. complacent, and too lazy to leave us. and even when they do, they leave us momentos. their bones. the bones of our ghosts. lightly touching each other, shaken by the wind outside.
and i find my story-telling is changing too. no more parables. anthropomorphic transmutations. little girls in wheelchairs reinventing physics and hands conversing and japanese teapots in which we evacuate our soul. not soo much anymore. my stories now are... the flourescent lights of mcdonald's at 2am. the after-taste of cheeseburgers. somewhere inside my body amphetamines are tweaking my heartbeat. focusing my eyes. wrapping around my brain a curtain to protect it from its own self-destructive nails and teeth. you hear my body humming, like a refrigerator. everyone else has gone to have sex. presumably. that's what people do. i stare at women's faces, i speak but i never know what i'm saying. automaton. my concentration is on trying to find constellation shapes on her freckles. i look into eyes too deeply. i'm trying to gather clues. stories about tongue-kissing and fathers and mothers divorcing and sisters in wheelchairs and nights at the beach and broken-in-half love affairs and rum and coke spilled on shirts and jeans. hand jobs under tables and in the women's bathrooms at Roma St. Station. these are young stories. stories about my generation- of which i'm a distant observer- on account of my self-exile. my incessant loneliness. my perpetual outsiderness. (i shake my head at my mother. - no no no. i can't agree with that proposition mom. not entirely anyway.
- why not?
- one thing is there's no baseline. in your time there was. common knowledge. shared experiences, and history. and religion or cultural a... a normative behavioural outlook. people had protocols of behaviour, behaved similarly. liked and disliked things all together. there were movements and collectives.
- not now?
- god no! we are flooded with ideas. with perspectives. no two people have even heard of the music the other listens to. movies. books. education is different. cultures all mixed and intertwined. religion. ranges in the socioeconomic spectrum. everything hazy and blurry. no one can expect, nay fathom, commonality in any sense. we are all pods. floating and groping and misunderstanding. that's where the lack of empathy comes from. the pandemic loneliness. mental isolation. pill-popers and prayer-mumblers, all the same. (and my therapist who says i'm addicted to connection). (it's 4:47am, friday morning. another night of tricking myself out looking for it... exhausted if it wasn't for chemical processes flooding my blood with adrenaline, and disappointed, hollow, humiliated, dejected, if it wasn't for the chemical-curtain cordoning the hungry patter of blood-thirsty neurons away from me. often i'm terrified not to feel it. like... i've been hiding from them all day, they're just gonna wait for me after-school, and be twice as angry).
the new beat generation. not cool enough to be hipsters. not brave or special. just guys. girls. stories about working in coffee-shops to make rent. people screaming in other rooms. about first kisses on parkbenches. the crack when you finally get to the icecream cone, your fingers sticky with melted cookies&cream. stories about fumbled drunken sex, all around me, people stumbling into each other. i stand with a mouthful of redbull i don't want to swallow, gum still in my mouth too. looking at red-eyes and freckles in poor lights and watery eyes at 2am and barefoot blondes in blue dresses with long toes, and barefoot brunettes in black dresses with small cute feet. smiling suggestively, and me staring from a sober, distant clarity. drugged enough to challenge reality. i get quiet. calm. hard for me to care. i notice i laugh less, i make jokes with a straight face. i 'see' thoughts, feelings, they just can't get to me. i don't 'have' them.
how these fragments come together i don't know. the stories of our happiness and our afternoons and our sunrises at the beach, with Regina the night/morning we first met with me staring at the seagulls and saying not very much as the sky turned from a near-death-blue to a brazen orange. do characters exist? are we even characters?, or just people? just that guy. the goodlooking blonde you know the one. that guy who's always speaking on his phone. i don't like the idea of a writer as a storyteller. i like the idea of a writer as an archiver. a collector of miracles and hard-work and near-misses and complete failures. a collector of blurry red-eyes and the girls who stared back at me with them. of pushy guys waiting for drinks at the bar, sleeves rolled up to exhibit ostentatious biceps. just the guy who follows you around scribbling the pricks you feel from looks and stares and phrases sighed and mumbled and prayers said in cars at sunrise staring at the beach.
i'm not a new person. i'm not fixed. i'm the same guy. only now i'm distanced from myself too. (and i'm unable to feel sad about that. i'm actually unable to compute that thought). (it's the strangest of my dreams to come true).
and it's not enough for a story. just scraps. by the ways. PS.
fragments (thoughts)
Dash Snow, courtesy tv blog
sure i'm tired,
____but thinking about life, it increases my heart-rate for god's sake.
___no, you do. you always wanna talk about it. i'm not saying that ;
__i'd call it a preoccupation that's what.
(and afterwards takes hours to put them all back in their box again)
____all i'm saying is, there are no lessons left there for us. we've digested them all.
___what? we ate the meat, we've cleaned the bones. look at them shine like teeth in moonlight.
__the bones or our ghosts.
*___*___*
music louder. louder. dance air, dance. move. stop standing there doing nothing.
it's like swallowing more than you can eat. force-feeding it into your ear. take it take it take it.
dilute my blood with it.
there's a frontier here somewhere that i need to open.
all possibility. throwing out likelihood and the crankshaft and margins of error.
when you get it right, everything takes a step back from you. you're haloed.
not happiness exactly. not hope- invincibility.
the only logical outcome of my humanity: to abandon it.
*___*___*
there's nothing left to talk about. think of your skin not as a boundary per se, but as a general guideline. a rule of two thumbs and dropped keys in the parking lot. everything a prelude. gateway drugs. sinister laughs, teeth white. make thursday dance for its bread. i speak one language: noise. don't feel emotions, feel heartbeats and bicep contractions and tingles of cold and numbness across my skin. i am all sensation, no thought. banish that.
(my cold hands are the only way i can tell now. the euphoria's gone. the feeling 'high'. i can't remember what my brain was before all this. how it worked, sounded... manouvered around itself. the dose has gone up. magic beans?, maybe; or pearls that were eyes, or sugar tablets or hits of reality not even reality can fathom. maybe. i can't remember how it processed. what the speed of things were. what my eyes would notice. can't remember can't remember. not important. this is a brave new bedlam. (louder, music louder) (speaker's howl and screech). i can't tell. take another? wait and see how cold your hands get in half an hour. now? (or are they little white teeth or shrunken dried out stars? are they shards of calcified angel's wings, frozen-in-time teenager first-kisses? silver bullets. a physical representation of C and B natural pressed together on the piano, a clue about the colour of the future? one sixteenth of an orgasm, salt, the scales of God's skin? is it a voodoo quick-fix shortcut to Wonderment? is it the dust of the valley of truth? is it delusion? is it a recollection of madness? the darkdark premonition of a darkdark future breeding shadows into every whichwhateverway? is it all i have? best-friends and/or the discovery channel for the curious-on-the-go, is it the sweet-sorrow of parting? is it the rinds from drum-skins after rock concerts? is it trance music condensed? is this hell is this heaven is this pandemonium? dear god i'm soo [emotion for which no word has been invented] not to feel fear...
(louder. dance. dance. louder. louder. louder. louder.
____(initiate launch sequence now)
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Preludes
____i. sexuality.
a russian doll i have crowded most of myself into it. watered it.
two parts loneliness, three parts the feel of eyelids on dry lips.
if i unpack it i find cold bedsheets. i find the air as it is every 3am.
its heart is memory ; (her heavy hair fallen on my face)
______(with open, dilated eyes, our mouths kissed in my car)
each beat is the sensation of skin reverberating.
it has incorporated into itself pink bras. yellow couches. white feet. oriental lilies.
three parts of every four are just silent eyes- patient, silent eyes.
__its blood is a two-way-dream: imaginary stilletos , hunger-pangs , every first hello's heavy
__possibility , fantasy's sharp sting; and the quietly fading, peaceful blurring of memory as it picks yesterday's flowers.
it is my abdomen, tensed against lips. muscular contractions resisting. wrists pinned behind heads. humid pants. it is the colour of rum. lip marks on plastic cups. paralysed motion: what is the word for desperation?
half its luggage is saliva cooling on my neck. hairbands lost under beds. navels. elbows. clavicles.
single words orphaned from their sentences, little treasures. broadcast ceaselessly over Sunday brunch and midnight drives home. ambient fossils and little hooks. scraps of our stories, and their eroded contexts.
its parts drift into one another: every humiliation's pivot , every defeat's redemption. it pulsates between minor massacres, the electrcity of pubic hair, squandered futures. unpacked it is notebooks. giftwrap. icecream. distances not even memory can surmount- and the exhausted voices of tired throats trying to cross them over telephones.
an avalanche of our days. a nuclear holocaust in our pocket. blonde hair in sunlight. smiling black holes. venetian lace. gasps. spasms. the immutable seasons of our tinkering humanity.
____ii. prayer.
out of cold hands, through the backalley shortcut, take the train awhile, stand in the sunlight it's worth noticing, three dinners and a breakfast later-
__whatever cards you're still holding, wallets and purses and hands hidden in pockets, waiting the rain out at busstops, medicated and misunderstood, smiling hope into every prayer,
out of flaccid pillows, ignoring the locked entryways, biding time through the backstreets, smoke through sometimes boredom, look both ways before crossing, take your coffee to go and smile at Rolphie,
__despite the din of memory, whispered slanders of heavy ghosts, rest your knees- sit on the parkbench, casually or clumsily, ran or stumbled, look at us, out of calenders and black-holes and broken-backed wheelchairs, have emerged. spat, cursed, prayed and tongue-kissed our way out of our smalltimes, shanty hometowns, mispronounced last names.
out of quiet voices, take the ferry across, pay the man his due early-or-late makes no difference, follow the tracks the maps haven't been redrawn yet, lost coats and broken umbrellas, clinging to the hem of robes or the fumes of purple smoke or pills in your pocket making a noise every step you take, have fabricated a tinkle of happiness to read by through the night-
__whatever cloud you're chasing brother, sister, friend, i hope it is a comforting silence you find. consider the price we have payed: youth and transport, rent and alcoholism, backseat blow-jobs, time, drip-coffee, freshly-shaven made-up high-heeled school-uniformed painted-nails waxed-back, failed and dropped-out-of, punched and talked-out-of, every conceivable insomnia paranoia annorexia...
out of solitary breakfasts we have emerged.
take a step back, my first breath i'm inhaling a rainbow.
[insert emotion here]
i can feel it crouched down behind every pill. biding its time. patient. it's the strangest thing, like when you close your eyes and the black changes shape and form and colour... thoughts can do that too- emotions. just tingle across your conscience like shadows. like distant sounds. clouds you don't have to deal with. i can sense motions and activity. it's in there somewhere, just walking around.
on the outside i'm a little hazy. unable to assign words to feelings- unable to discern the feelings themselves. i don't laugh very easily. don't get angry for no reason and shout anymore. moderation is a strange gulp to have drunk. after breakfast i sit on a hillock and watch the ocean for a while. i have books but i don't read them. don't think. sit and sense the sun on my face. sense my legs, under denim, being warmed. occupying my body takes diligence. i try and notice the whitewashed colours. listen to the sounds, they are soo distinct. there is only silence in my head, no distractions... all i have left to do is experience moments. sit inside them and be enveloped in them. interact with them however i can. i try and archive my visceral observations. my senses.
time and space are troublesome concepts for me. constantly shifting and morphing. sometimes minor twitches, othertimes barren infinitudes. i stare at the waves and try to sense time. feel it travelling through me. try to feel it, like nibbly lip-kisses, or grapes beween my fingers, or my skin losing its elasticity. i cannot find a way to record this. it merely passes through my spread fingers. i am not saddened by my failures. at least it doesn't feel like sadness. it is a sort of shadow inside my head. a sort of ripple that's transmitted across the surface of an otherwise still lake. i am removed from these things. it does not feel like a heaviness. it is more like... someone breathing softly- but that is all. having no effect on you whatsoever. merely the sound of someone breathing, to themselves, over there somewhere. somewhere about the place behind a curtain. i see the shadow of these breaths. cloud like things. puffs maybe.
it is hard to write this. it is not interesting to me. thoughts and feelings that don't relate to tangible 'things' are not interesting to me. clarity comforts me. solid geometries. things that make 'sense' and have solutions. i feel robotic, and terribly proud to be. i exist somewhere where misunderstandings are called scalene triangles; and boredom is an obtuse angle. conversations are geometric sequences. hand-holding follows (generally) Maxwell's equations. people exist in this haze of missing self-awareness. i stand apart from them, trying to pick their locks so i can reduce them back into consistent forms. back into constituent shapes. the right things said in the right sequence with the right attitude. calm their insecurities. entice their better natures. whisper a smile unto their face. lock picked. now i can see who this person is underneath the electrical storm.
i am soo tired. (here that is modelled by a classical pendulum).
i find it easy to speak about recision of contract due to breach of essential terms- and impossible to describe first-kisses, or humiliation, or... it's 2am, it feels no different from 4pm. i cannot tell if the room is cold or if it's just me.
disassembly is such a pleasant word.
Saturday, July 11, 2009
Sun 4:06 AM
Twine, Kristyn Janae
it's long after the amphetamines have stopped working , the clarity is gone , the silence. i notice the huff of my own breaths, and my heart's less intense , skin doesn't tingle. the fake breasted, cold faced strip club dancers are gone. the girls in the streets, down the mall, with the fake blonde and high-heels. the cold creeps in . mcdonald's wrappers . and cleaners with shaven heads and bushy goatees pressure hosing the sidewalks . the voices have stopped , the thinking ahead and planning the next thing to say. the banter has stopped . the distant eyes , the red eyes , the unhappy looks . the bumps as you walk . the light burps- the gaseous taste of redbull . the frequent, bored escapes to the bathroom where you wash your face and are surprised by the feel of it . the noisy cars are gone , the streets are full of zombies and drunks and stumblers stumbling home . shouting and moving in the cold , their breaths hanging in the air as condensation a few moments . the taste of lips is gone . my fingers smell like women's saliva . in the distant some youths scream under a yellow streetlight . police officers with bored, unhappy faces stroll past . the printed t-shirts move through the cold air. chubby girls with barefeet move along, heels in their hands . the loud sound of men laughing, the pats on the back are gone . the women's hugs, the lips lost in hair, trying to find ears is gone . the feel of bars against your stomach , the thumping noise of sound-systems seems soo far away . my own voice seems so distant, misplaced in the cold somewhere . kicked along like an empty can . the man peeing against the wall is gone . the young boy with the closed eyes, face to pavement spitting out a sickly white , who knows where he is . the blonde guy with the cut on his face , the three girls with the ugly laugh on the streetcorner . the ID cards are put away . the cabs drive too fast , swatting at them like butterfly nets .
i arrive at the water, soaked in moonlight and urine-tinged streetlights . i feel comforted by its sound. repetitive. perennial. the sand must be soo cold right now. consistent rhythm. unwaving like electroclash fashions and the club-of-the-week flyers . i feel defeated. destroyed. like i have lost a great many things. i cannot remember the laughs. i'm scared to speak. i won't dare eat. this is a terrible way to have died.
Monday, July 6, 2009
experiments with calibration: Day 4
____within the grasp of Thy hand Thou holdest the determined measures of all things.
________the Bab
the sound of the beach used to scare me. for the longest time. that subtle pounding seemed precarious. i stare out at it through the windshield. grass, trees, waves, field of blue, continuous line of the horizon, dark clouds. a couple of drops land on my windshield. i stare out, listening to the ocean, while he finishes reading. it's unimportant to listen i think. if you do you do, but if you don't... it's enough that those words are being said. mumbled or whispered or orated out loud. the air changes. the whole universe readjusts and notices you again. two children squeal as they go down the path on their bikes. a few seconds later: two mothers power-walking side by side.
i like the colour of grass on overcast days. i like the colour of everything on overcast days.
it never stops surprising me how these words grow suddenly vast when you feel small(est). how the sounds suddenly become soo intense that even as i mumble breathlessly i struggle to speak. almost cry. how incredible it all seems when you realise you are nothing. when you spent half the night reading about postsynaptic receptors and indirect noradrenaline stimulation and pharmacokinetics. controlled substances. issues with dependence. symptoms and causes and differential diagnoses and tried to imagine your own brain buzzing with these little chemical flies and flickering on and off in the soon-to-be-morning hours as little bursts of electricity kept you functioning. (and you are terrified)
i exhale. lick my lips- my lips are always dry. mouth too. i drink more water than a blue whale. there in the corner, now that i'm sober again i see my old self sitting, slouched against a wall. he looks beat. unshaven. he smiles at me. it is such a tender moment, like seeing an old friend. all is forgotten. him and his bastard self-sabotage. his rambling neurotic blahblahblah. his shaking hands and his phobia of dark rooms and silent nights and wanting to touch every woman's lips. it's like loving everything you hate about your sister. we embrace and i kiss him on the forehead. (and his paranoia. his fixations. narcicissm. his week-long zombie can't-do-anything see-anyone marathons). we stare into each other's eyes and smile. how you been old friend? neglected no doubt. i'm worried about us you know. how we're gonna get through all this, sort it out ya know? he smiles. for once he's the calm one.
____Whatever God hath willed hath been, and that which He hath not willed shall not be.
________the Bab
it never stops surprising me how welcoming these words are. how even after ignoring them for months... rebelling agianst them and pretending they don't exist and turning and walking the other way when you saw them coming, how willing they are to smile at you and take you back. and where else can a small(est) man hide if not there? where else will i and my loud.noisy.self-hating doppelganger go? who will smile at me and hold me and brush aside curtains so i can sit and stare at oceans?
i've only slept three hours. my eyes sting. i think i had two little tins of tuna yesterday. coffee. i have evolved beyond food. beyond sleep. when was it, must have been yesterday (seems soo far away... it is soo far away when you never sleep), i lay on the grass by the lake and stared at the clouds. when the sun finally came out i swooned. delighted. i am soo sensual these days. constantly focussing on what my body is doing. tightenings and dilations and tingles and clarity. i'm keeping a mental journal of the evolving world. also i flipped through a dusty book, read this, and realised how good it is to be human. (whatever the hell that means).
SOME TREES
____These are amazing: each
____Joining a neighbor, as though speech
____Were a still performance.
____Arranging by chance
____To meet as far this morning
____From the world as agreeing
____With it, you and I
____Are suddenly what the trees try
____To tell us we are:
____That their merely being there
____Means something; that soon
____We may touch, love, explain.
____And glad not to have invented
____Such comeliness, we are surrounded:
____A silence already filled with noises,
____A canvas on which emerges
____A chorus of smiles, a winter morning.
____Placed in a puzzling light, and moving,
____Our days put on such reticence
____These accents seem their own defense.
__________John Ashbery
Saturday, July 4, 2009
notapoem
phases, sundholmdesign
we are dancing machines. made perfectly for that. engineered so that i can gather your bare feet and ankles in my hands like water and lay them in my lap.
my heart rate can double in 8 seconds. in 30 i can grow wings and fly. i found a dream hidden in a book in the library. also, during a right-turn at midnight, under a yellow streetlight someone maybe had dropped it.
we are falling machines. collapsing from what? to what!. ears pricked for epiphanies, every hair i lose is another monday's worth of life. i'm swapping my body for time. (we are dreaming machines. (eyeslids soo beautiful when we sleep
piano keys feel like skin, and i have lonely fingertips. they are cold, like dipping my fingers in water, or falling into a mirror. what side of what!(?) did i wake up on?- dear You, yes, you there with the brown eyes, my goodness you are a miracle. here the day is constructed with bones. clean. geometric. we are floral-machines, i dream in tulip petal and geranium red. i dream in the kink of the stem.
we are machines that make love. produce it. daily discover it and invent it, rework it relive it, condem it, pardon it, fall into it, slide out of it, kiss the stars of it, hold the hair of it, rub our cheek against the cheek of it and pant our hot breath into its mouth in regular thrusts. we are machines that mine it and save it. dip our memories in it. fade colours and dim songs into it. kiss shoulders and hold the waists of it. scar our hearts for it, slam our heads into midnight walls for it. deliver letters demanding it. obsess with it and snort the powder of what we're left with of it.
time is a box. space another. i can determine everything in vector coordinates at last. i am quantised. (remember when we were the faintest idea inside someone's ear?, (remember when someone first found your name, sitting in a closet or nametag or over a first date i'm sorry but if it's a girl it must be Juliet. Ella. Sophia.
there are no more numbers to count our mistakes with, so i have thrown away the calenders. she has lonely eyes. her hands fidget. sssshhhhh my dear. here we are all equally regardless. if i can smile i can gasp my way out of this smalltime 2am sunday. we are hoping machines. an atomic furnace worth. (i lay on her lap and she plays with my hair before i leave).
here are my dark eyes. here my precocious hands. we are sinking machines. we are sunken cathedrals. we are fallen discoverers. we are nautical miles and light years. we are fossilized stones and precious metals. we are extinguished stars and deleted file-names. we are handwritten letters and neglected toe-nails. we are specks and hated neighbours and delicious cupcakes and bright eyes and undared-to-hope-for yearnings and oh my god we are soo much everything. we are water fights. we are deliverance machines. we are such allwonderfulloveliness.
and when i fell, out of my chest exploded daffodils and harmonicas and Aboriginal Dreamtime and the Caspian Sea.
Friday, July 3, 2009
dextroamphetamine (fun with drugs pt 1)
"what do you mean?"
"mom! it's weird. i used to pay a lot of money and feel really guilty to feel like this, now i get it for free and doctors encourage me to use it."
"you feel guilty?"
____yes. (7pm)
i'm driving home. i shouldn't have said that. yeah. shouldn't have. he did give me an odd look. totally shouldn't have said that. i think he was a bit unhappy. i don't know though. hard to tell. they had been drinking, so... maybe didn't even notice it. oh. damn. you forgot to print that tutorial stuff off. yeahyeah. soon as i get home. also trash is collected tomorrow. empty the bins. really, was it that funny a look? i think so. maybe. also, maybe not. could be anything. crap. dammit. you do this everyday.
____maybe. (8:30pm)
again? why not. i need to test this thing out. get used to it. also i'm tired. exhausted. i've gotten soo thin, i look kinda gross. whatever, who cares. what if cops pull you over again?, they could tell. you're catastrophizing again. she gave you that article to read about spotting 'negative thinking patterns'. right right. no reason for that. maybe i should just stay in. no. why? cause. i'm tired. exhausted. anything could happen. screw it. screw it? totally. another? yes. 2. go. now. water. no thinking, just go. [gulp]
____no. (9:15pm)
i'm staring at the road. red is red. there, in the distance. green now. easy. quiet. how quiet everything is. i slow down, she jumps in. "i want to tell you about how i'm feeling right now."
"ohh-k."
"it's soo quiet."
"here?"
"yes, but also, in my head. it's weird. it's quiet. it's just what it is."
"what iss it?"
"green is green. red is red. i am listening to you. also i am speaking. there is nothing else. everything else is distant. far away. it's the oddest feeling." [it feels like nothing's chasing me]
"that's good right?"
"other things too. my skin's tingling. if you touch me it's pleasant. touch me please."
[she pats my arm and leaves her hand there a little while]
"yes. like that. it's very pleasant. i feel... can i just say this: everything will be ok. did you know that?"
"that everything will be ok?"
"yeah. did you know?"
"oh my god you're soo weird right now."
"yesyes, i know, but, i just feel like... school is school. and... __stuff is stuff. red is red. i'm in this car. i'm listening to you. and i'm formulating my words. that's all that is happening.__ there is nothing else happening. i feel soo... __have you ever taken extasy or anything?"
"No Q!"
"ok. so you have nothing to compare it to. uhm. i love you. i'm resisting this strange urge right now to high-text (as opposed to drunk text) everyone i know and tell them i love them. i love everything.
_______i want to smile at everyone."
"that's great Q... right?"
"i dont' know. at first it felt wrong. like it did when i was younger. and... i only ever did it because of the way it made me feel. __it made me... the person i always wished i was. i loved everyone. i'd do anything for them. i smiled. everything would be ok. life was wonderful. i just wanted to dance and smile and... __just that really."
"so what's the problem?"
"well. at first i was thinking, oh no. i'm high. i don't know how it's happened but the universe has conspired to... get me high."
"aaaand?"
"do you think though, this is what occured to me, i was speaking to my mom, she just wanted to check-in and see how i was feeling with everything, and it occured to me... maybe this is what the rest of the world feels like all the time? like... in their heads it's this quiet. and they're... i'm just soo happy with myself sitting in this chair right now. i'm really happy you're with me. i'm... ok with it. __it's friday. great. whatever. __saturday's tomorrow- we'll deal with it tomorrow. you know?"
"i think so..."
"i'm saying, it's soo hard to judge what 'normal' is. i've only ever been inside my own head. it's noisy there. and everything is a little bit complicated, and problematic. and right now- it's not. and... i'm starting to think, for the first time in a forever long time, maybe this is the person i was always supposed to be. i was supposed to be as calm as i am now. __i'm a great person did you know that?"
[laughs] "Q!, of course you are!"
"i know that now. because right now... i swear,__ i searched within myself, i couldn't find a single bad intention. a single bad thought about any one or any thing. i'm just... i hope everything goes well for everyone. that's all i want. that's what makes me a good person. right now i'm soo happy about that. with it. me."
"this is... i don't know what to say."
"i think it's a problem of standards. what's the standard? i mean, who says what the norm is for normal-in-your-head-volume. no one can measure that."
...
...
"what are you thinking?"
"i'm not. i'm just looking. and absorbing the feeling of... wow"
"what?"
"it's contentment."
____definately not. (1:20am)
i get out my car. it's cold. it's a weird feeling. when i move into cold environments my skin tingles too- like i've been touched all over. i look at the moon. no thoughts. just... this white orb. some stars. this incredible white light. what silence. key in lock. door closes. door opens. lights on. if there are beasts i do not know of them. i see... chairs. carpet. how wonderful my room looks. soo pleasant. i change. the feel of softer fabrics against my skin, i feel suddenly at home. that immediate comfort. i sit. silent. unafraid. silent. silent. silent. my god.
______________________________________________how strange the sound