thoughts (fragments)

reflection in a dirty window, hello bum


our parents have boyfriends and girlfriends nowadays. and the parents of our parents' boyfriends and girlfriends can die. it seems adults have feelings too. that's when it happens. when people die. breakups. get lost in themselves and stop calling back - that's when photographs are born. old letters and postcards and scribbles are given souls. and memories become haphazard phantoms that are hard to think of and harder to dammit.forget.

*___*___*


having not told a story for months, now in a room more like a storage, with a fan turning the summer round aimlessly, i'm sprawled, waiting for one to dawn on me ___or at least to remember some of the things from before ; and life just creeks on by, hitting reply automatically like, hey did you hear the one about?)

to be home... i don't know. my mom always says, keep outta that town god dammit, makes you depressed. i say it's the ghosts, the shadows are a few shades heavier here. like asian hair. you can feel it in your hand when you hold it how much heavier it is. shadows like that. few shades heavier like a thicker fabric.

i feel a year older, a year more full of tales to exorcise. perhaps i am the sort of writer who always absorbs but never releases. fills up like a balloon. before i die i'll croak a seven-word sentence that'll be it allofeverything i've discovered worth saying and even then the nurse will look to whoever punk i've made promise to pull the plug on me i'm more euthanasia than your typical cancer ward, and he'll say to the nurse, 'no idea, Q's finally gone crazy. Here's those forms you wanted signed, let's pull the plug and burn what's left i gotta get to my kid's soccer match he always loses and blames me for it no doubt it's my fault if he fails at everything'.

*___*___*


but it is not a problem. to have words left over. long division was never exactly my strongest suit. nor the pinstripe. i work best just seeing what i saw, early mornings left over after the midnights are too blurry. here is a fan. here is a man in boxers, grasping for the memory of a year he recalls enjoying. all of it raw sore eyes on sharp paper and enjoygasms in beds and showers and waking up at strange hours not knowing when he fell asleep and then 50 hours more on the little-speed-pill-train. all i ever wanted was to be enough. whatever that is. in quantity or quality. but the doctor says, all good, here's six more repeats of the prescription, glad to know you're still standing, and the train's fast can't get a word out. now. dizzy and hot and can't tell sleep-from-wake i want to hug something other than a too-warm pillow and tell stories and listen to Max Richter's the blue notebooks which makes me want to cry, goddammit i hate being home.

*___*___*

in a town, somewhere else, night was a chemistry-lab uncertainty. a grad student named Ricardo got the idea one day while closing his eyes to kiss his girlfriend that that colour, on the inside of his eyelids, may be reproducible. with the help of 4 ink-injecting squid and a litany of tea-bags he set to work. adding concentrated bromine solution and some paper he'd asked his little sister to cry on.

*___*___*

because everywhere men die like flies and grow sick like summertime fruit.
the spectacles on our faces betray us, and we wake up late at night craving cereal and hugs and ejaculations.
________so what's next my dad's girlfriend's dad's dead a man i never met but am thinking about tonight anyway.
and my own grandfather too, more than a year now.
for a year i lived in LA and fell in love in various positions like a Kuma Sutra for the heart,
and then for a few months i walked around Adelaide and did what i could to resist a bullet kissing the inside of my brain, and then law, and then the raw eyes, and when i wake up i am in all sorts of strangeness my body doesn't recognize me and i can't recall where my brain's been all this time i've been reading and kissing and god only knows what else.

someone dim the lights.
maybe just a lamp, if nothing else.

anyone who's read their Shakespeare knows that all the tragedies are as much a farce.
they all die and Fortinbras comes in with a smile to carry off the throne,

whatever did the old bastard mean by that one.

*___*___*

but here is no song i know how to sing.
put your lips to mine, what i have is an earthquake i can't remember the beat to dance to