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. ______)