lay down your arms

.., goldfieldfoxes


after three days, i turn my head and say ok, it's gone now. i'm fine. He looks and asks our other companion what was wrong with him? and she says come-down weekend and he nods knowingly, oh yes. (oh yes).


*___*___*

___- no. i don't like forced creativity.
___- nor i. that's why i haven't been writing. nothing to be said.
___- yah.
___- yah. ___which is weird, i've been soo sad. usually when i'm sad i feel like writing.
___- so?
___- maybe it's a quiet sadness. one not needing words.
___- sounds like an even sadder sadness.
___- or a more modest one.
___- maybe.
___- how's this one?
___- it's good. take it to the counter I'll meet you there i need one more thing.
___- k.


*___*___*

i splash some water on my face in the shower. Q, calm down calm down calm down. Q clam down. Q calm down calm down calm down. i can't close my eyes because i haven't had 8 eight hours sleep in two days if i close my eyes i won't reopen them. i just try and keep soap suds and shampoo out their way. everything does not depend on this. this is not the end of your life. it's just another thing leading to another thing that maybe maybe one day a long time from now might mean something that may turn out not to be the thing that does it at all. it's just a thing. that's all. just a thing. dried off i pick a tie, eventually. i'm at that place again, where the future terrifies me, and every percent and odd glance and penfull of ink means something.


*___*___*

i'm tired of writing about people in love. or not in love but tempted to be. or not even tempted but kicking the idea around down the street like an empty plastic soda bottle. and spring-time breakups and people's first kisses in the rain. i've got nothing left on running away from homes and hometowns. no point telling stories about giving our teachers and bosses a hug and the finger and packing satchels and secretly shipping away on a carriage to some place without an airport. nothing left to say on those topics. nothing left to say on late night internet porn and 2-minute noodles and how tired eyes get after days and days of taking it all in. oh tshirts with printed designed. of bookshelves growing slowly in the bedrooms and living rooms and office shelves, what's the point of that? tired of the Smiths and Kandinsky and Haifa and Los Angeles and women's breasts and boxer shorts and the smell of beer bottles the next day when someone cleans it all up. nothing left.


*___*___*

___- i thought you were sad. something was off.
___- yah.
___- and?
___- and it was a roller coast. __and it's still a mess. __and we'll deal with it.
___- yup, well spoken.


*___*___*

even moving is difficult. it takes me four energy drinks to manage driving myself home, showering, dressing, and driving back. when asked about anything i give a confused face and look away, hoping to be ignored. ___it's painful to move too much.


*___*___*

11:38am Sun Feb 28.
it's taken me since thursday afternoon. four days of lashing out and spontaneously falling asleep and stumbling around rooms and not standing straight. and tomorrow, we go back to it. put its leash on and let it take me for a walk. (i listen to music about dancing and it takes on an add meaning. a greater significance).


*___*___*

i didn't really see ashtree. this bothers me.


*___*___*

i don't have a nocturne in me tonight. i'm just emotional. kinda. and hungry. tired. not quite recovered and preparing to welcome the pill-breath zombie again tomorrow.

so this is the life we live. terrified of the future, inferiority complex alienating everyone i know further and further away from me, insecure, and always stumbling to fall into the lap of love - be it ours, someone's suggestions, or watching our friends from afar.

or something like that.
i need to sleep for one last time.

up [date]

untitled, petra collins


___but i clicked the wrong link and all i saw were pictures of beautiful thin girls with long limbs and too strongly featured faces they looked like insects in strange habitats licking their lips at me with high heels and short skirts and bony thighs,

so i turned the music up louder, a deep trance set that sounds like music from another planet, where the souls of dead industrialists gyrate and schiz to the soundtrack of shipping yards and textile factories grooving to clanging pots and pans mixed in with haloed drawls of planetary frequency shifts like doppler effects going whaaaaaaaaaaaaaa (which makes the kids on exstasy put up their hands the way the team-Jesus do when they testify (each to their own Lord i guess,

___everytime my once-upon-a-parents get divorces i think to myself of the house and if it'll miss us, having grown accustomed to our feet and our shouts and bruises and if it will miss me painting its gutters or pushing up its soil with the retaining wall or if it's all just quiet ssshhh tomb who couldn't care one way or another. maybe we're just too loud a bunch for these houses. maybe it's just that. just a matter of not being aurally compatible.

___of course i'm hyper, bowl of cereal, amphetamines and two energy drinks for breakfast and i'm calm enough to sit here and swallow all the work i've got to do if i intend to be perfectly better than i am (ever will be) the smart kids say 'maybe he's one of us, we'll have to wait and see' and the dumb kids think 'there's that nerd with the Burberry glasses' and the future of the world stares at me cooly thinking another one of these damn up-and-comers thinks he's got what it takes - damn future so damn demanding if you have perfect grades you're not rounded, if you're rounded like a perfectly totally voluptuous chick then you don't have the grades, if you have extracurricular activities you're probably missing something else all it is in the end is paper i've been to China twice, lived through a war, half a dozen divorces, played more cards in ICU wards than your average nurse and once shouldered an 80yr old woman outta my way to get to the counter of McDonalds quicker cause i wanted a cheeseburger more than sweet deliverance the future can eat my shorts.

___also i need to write an essay about love or something therelike i need it written like now and i need it to simply be the best thing i've ever concocted out of my half mistaken brain i need it to simply be born into a world that understands it soo completely and takes it into its arms like yet another bruised half incomplete, insecure, whimper of a person with only enough ambition to stand up and (try to) be itself and dance to its own beat and mumble its own jingle i need it to be about as insecure as we all are and also i want it to be about when you get into a new relationship and have to think about who sleeps where in the bed because my natural tendency is to face the door and so that means she always gets my back which, because i compromise, remedy by giving her the bestest pillow and saying there you go babs, that's my surrogate and she says that's fail.

i stare at her feet while she tells me about the funeral and it's easy to listen to people when there really isn't a thing you can say to make anything be better than it is. so i stare at her feet and think maybe one day to write something about them.

___and then it's saturday. then it's wendesday. it's night. it's day. i'm thinner. fatter. not hungry. haven't eaten in days. suddenly starving. horny. lost. found. dead and alive fifteen times i want to be alone soo much i can't bear to think of it, i'd crumble so i ask her to stay just stick around even if we don't talk it's nice to look at you asleep on my couch while i sit at the desk,

but these are the adventures we have. not houses lifted up and away by balloons or treasure islands under coffee tables or dead bodies in the backs of Rolls Royces. our adventures are at the coffee shops and the law library. in our living rooms with our families fighting and in our bedrooms where our girlfriends ask to be hugged and our erections are distracted and our peers judge us and the future discounts us and we ourselves fight inferiority complexes and anorexia and take drugs coffee, heroin, sex, nicotine, internet porn, techno, marijuana, high-heeled bar hopping, Jesus, JackJimJohnny Walk me home by any other name is still just... save me help me,
up.

up.

and


away. ______)

thoughts (fragments)

untitled, mala marija


i don't have stories because i live inside of rooms not outside of them. (she looks over my application and says, well, North Carolina will be warmer, Chicago's cold that time of year. i smile, the aircon in the libraries will work the same. it's a joke and she chuckles and turns the page, __i'm sadder for the truth of it. i'll probably not go to the Art Institute often enough.


*___*___*

ever think, a couple hundred years from now, after the fires and the gentrification and the projects and the capital gains tax and a couple of wars, recessions and olympics, __and people live and die and alternate with tight and loose clothes being fashionable, RayBans being always cool just the same, and global warming so it snows in the middle of the pacific ocean where there's no one to notice it, __one day after all that, an archeologist will find in a mound of rubble just inland from the coast of South Africa, the Galapagos Islands, northern Israel, a book with your signature in it. a shoe with what's left of your sweat still inside it. a drawing you did for your mother when you were three and she kept because that's what mother's do in a folder that once upon a time also contained your birth certificate, a photocopy of your university degree (with a paperclip attaching a small picture of you in the silly hate, a mother's day letter from when you were 12, and a postcard you sent her once from Venice to say you were alive and well and she was right you probably should.could have fit a few more pairs of underwear into the backpack. __ever wonder if it's your fragment of a Grecian urn that'll be found so a future Keats can write an ode about it?


*___*___*

THINGS YOU PROBABLY DIDN'T THINK WHEN YOU WERE 10 YOU'D EVER THINK EVER, A LIST:

(1) these shoes are uncomfortable as all hell but i look sexy as all hell in them (and taller too)
(2) leave me alone, i wanna stay in bed a bit longer
(3) grass stains are the most annoying to get out. (actually, cherries too)
(4) i like well made beds. they make sleep so... formal. like an invitation.
(5) i'm lonely. consequently, i think i'll stream internet videos of other people having sex and hopefully just fall asleep quicker
(6) dude, i'll call you back, i'm just watching the news
(7) sushi beats pizza.
(8) i have nobody i can talk to about this. this is my problem.
(9) maybe i should just get it terminated. it's nothing, then life will go on. again. ish.


*___*___*

- you got the Dean's list. now you want the VC list. then, you wanna go overseas and prove you can do it there too - are you noticing a pattern? you're never happy, nothing's ever enough for you, __just... freaking enjoy the process or something. you found what you wanna do with your life, great!, so why all the hectic, obsessive, stress?
- never underestimate the partnership of a sincere inferiority complex and the obsessive compulsion that results from the fear of being an abysmal failure...
- you're not a failure, look at yourself, you're topping classes, you're fit, you have friends... what, where does this come from?
- i can still taste it. __10 years of it, i can taste it. __still. everytime i'm waiting for a result, talking to someone about... a job or what happens when this all done, or 'what's next' or, __all i remember is 10 years of not knowing and hating everything and sitting behind the computer calling people and sending f*cking resumes (god dammit i hate sending resumes) wishing hoping that someone will just blow my brains out - no way i'm doing that again. no way.
- you still need a night off.
- yah. i know.


*___*___*

i'm tired of taking account of all the times i f*cked something up. tired of carrying around soo much it. you put it outta mind, but, it's there. someone says something you remember. right there, like it were yesterday. like it were now. just once i need to finish something and think, yup. owned it.


*___*___*

black 1965 mustang. __a white, thick, gorgeous woolen blanket that i'll fold and leave on my couch for when we do impromptu movie-sessions on rainy sundays and warm thursday nights. __leather foldover briefcase thingee. __a home that smells of regularly bought jasmine. __where every mug is my favorite because i picked it, and a place where the art on the walls is invariably delicious. __bookshelves everywhere. __sunday afternoons and wednesday lunches spent in coffee shops writing in notebooks and reading Seneca, like i used to. __regular, slow jogs by the beach. the river. the park. on the treadmill. __phoning people back. having them phone me because there is a reasonable likelihood i'll actually show up. __my GF not being quietly annoyed at me for my inattentiveness and preoccupation.

things i'll one day (maybe) have (some of it, again).

displacement

just like old times then? the same... hazy uncertainty. dislocation, an inclination to believe something's off. only minimally. incrementally. like losing the orgasm right at the final___ you know. (god i hate being repetitive).

it's always funny to me how you forget your own states of being. the way LA was only 15 months ago away, but that was a different person. or Haifa. or any adventure that you can point to pictures and say yes, well, see there, it was me but, then you halt. it arises for me when i stare at a word for too long, i start to question if i've spelled it correctly.
___a few weeks ago, at the end of a five week stint without my little magic chemical beans, the way... it rushed. i forgot how scared i felt of everything. and always rushing and feeling late. and always too many fragments of malformed thoughts. i'd forgotten how unpleasant that feeling, that state, was. ___and now, i remember the alternative. it's, uhm, phantasmagoric. you see words hang in the air, like crystalline forms. condensation, but more certain than that. things slow, and time seeps into objects. there's this cactus in our front yard with a single white flower. most gorgeous thing. i'm certain i only see it in the evening. something i see, and i'm certain it's 3am i turn my car headlights on, and my coffee-table could be morning or Tuesday and the remote control for my stereo is actually somebody's voice and it's all...

a suspicion i suppose is how you can phrase it. an unquenchable suspicion. but of what? and that's the problem, a ridiculous search for ether. ___(be that as it may, there are too many dimensions to a day, to a person, to objects).

meanwhile i'm certain i smell. i don't seem to. no one seems to avoid my company. but i'm certain of it. when i drive home, a car follows me. it has only one functioning headlight, the other's dim. a droopy eye on a tired old man maybe. the car has an eye to where it's going and another staring out the window like a fascinated child or a bored just-about-teen, both silent and still and off in some other place(dimension(state, where pelicans grieve for dying figs and where emotions are stronger, more forceful, ___so that we frequently used to sit and regard them, in our laps, and probe them for what they actually were and how they functioned with our eyes glued to the blue passing by out the window of a car. listening to our ipods. or otherwise.
___and i shower twice, sometimes three times a day.

one day i expect to encounter an old man somewhere who will remind me to read more poetry. and a young woman who will lovingly shake her head at me and reach an arm out and ruffle my hair and say what will we do with you? in a tone that makes me know it's fine as it is. without needing something to be done. (always, alwaysalways, this pressure of the 'things to do'). (and i open my eyes just at the last minute before my car rolls into the stationary car in front - oh crap! i exclaim slamming the breaks, she opens her eyes, lips still pursed into an unfinished kissentence, lingering in the air like a silent moment after prayer. how did that even happen? she asks, i took my foot off the break, got distracted i say, and finish the kissentence with smile that leads like a rainbow to its close an overlapping of lips and purrs (with one squinty eye looking to the traffic light for green) (with one foot depressed firmly on a brake pedal). ___the old man will remind me to read more poetry, or at least be more myself. and i'll ask why? and he'll respond because perfect words to explain, or answer, or ask, you only encounter in the rarest moments of pristine sincerity. with my jaw open he'll leave me to go chase wilder dreamscapes and when i remember him it'll be as a cactus flower that i'll interpret as being a fresh water spring having opened in my front yard, and misinterpret later as 3am and feel a nocturnal delight (when i get there my friends ask me why i have my headlights on in the afternoon)

i wonder if sometimes, in its own time, in its own neuronic-twitching-electrical-impulse language, my brain sits and laments what i'm doing to it... ___perhaps just the way, in my own discursive, mutated poetical rambling nonsense, i sit on my couch and complain to the coffee table, to 8pm, to all those things that listen, about what my brain's done to me.

______( freedom from speech, and all our unclaimed rights. )

silence is no more the language of the sad as it is the property of the happy.
and this last line, like most of those that preceded it,

make no sense to me.
one day i should be held accountable for writing things i don't understand the meanings of.