thoughts (fragments)

you touch me,
i hear the sound of mandolins











untitled by ohsweetnuthin


Q, i fell in love she says. i nod, smile, look away the whole time. after a little while, she adds, he's in the army. he's 'there' now. i keep nodding. or maybe, it's that love is the devil. it's all i can think to say. amen bruther. i continue to think about the film about Francis Bacon i just quoted from.


*___*___*

she's got long brown hair. i imagine her in an old house, like my dad's maybe. can't tell the colour of her skin it's too dark in the room. she wears an oversized knit. in reality maybe it's purple but the lamp's missing a shade, so everything's cast a cheap golden tinge, i can't tell, looks brownish. she's like a little hope growing out of the old couch.

a couple hours later, she's thin. her hair colour's irrelevant. she sits with her legs crossed and dangles a slip-on from her foot. takes the other one off entirely, sits there reading. teasing gravity.

a while later she's short. eyes yellow, like a cat. smiley, but not too talkative. the kind you like to have around because they're happy but not annoying. she looks up at me - a consequence of genetics, nothing metaphorical. but it's an optical illusion, feels like we're eye to eye. in this dream someone calls me over. i look up, but she keeps staring at me. i'm extracted from my reverie.

with shorter hair she's cuter, but i can't tell why. probably makes her lips look more the shape of love-hearts. or shows her face rounder. she has on a tshirt she stole from me. when she moves i see glimpses of leg and underwear. when she looks away to think her own thoughts i remember to breathe again. when we kiss she'll whisper in my ear brrreeathe and i'll exhale on her neck. and she'll hold me till the blue cloud in me subsides. then she'll bring her face close for me to kiss again.


*___*___*

at the start of every semester i remember how tired i am. how much i want to go away. be away. how tired.
i walk out of the library, having stapled, holed and/or bound about 200 pages of reading. an armfull. i dream it's a package, wrapped in brown paper of flowers. orange tulips. or those cheap white flowers. or half a dozen fresh baguettes. or Finnegan's Wake. and it's not the brick path going down to my office. it's not that room, where i face dark wood paneling, besides a raised stage with a constructed judge's panel and three ornamental chairs. it's somewhere else. a cheap Berlin studio maybe. a rented garage in Wisconsin. and my footsteps aren't this silent hushed monk act. they'd crunch under half a centimeter of snow. a little crack, each step.

it's 2:11am i realize i haven't eaten since breakfast. the feeling in my abdomen is hunger.
yes but, do you understand what alexithymia is? my therapist would ask and i'd say yesyes i know what i means, i get it. except i didn't. i worked it out a few days ago. or maybe i knew it, then forgot it, then worked it out again independently a few days ago. it's feeling 'bad' without knowing why. not knowing what the feeling is, other than it's not happiness. it's sadness or hunger or fear or paranoia or disappointment or some million other things, i can't tell. i just know it's bad. so i wait it out.

it's not 2:14am. it's breakfast. they weren't sticks of bread, turns out they were flowers afterall. i'm on the second floor of an old apartment building. i have my balcony open, sheer curtains that blow in the wind. it's Paris i think. it's bright for the morning. it feels like this morning in Tel Aviv when i went with my dad. a decade ago almost to the day. i'm sitting with a woman who smiles at me but doesn't speak. we have heavy plates set out and i our tea from a japanese pot. maybe she's not really her, it's just the flowers. or she was the flowers. or there were no flowers at all it was just a handful of late autumn/early spring. maybe it's wasn't that either, it was 2:17am which is whatever you want it to be.
except breakfast.


*___*___*

i cancel my games of scrabble. tell my regular opponents i can't rematch them because i'm moving to Libya. to learn sorcery from an ascetic ex-cowboy named Wilbur Monroe. they don't believe me. i tell the next one i can't keep playing because i've been diagnosed with a terminal illness and i need to devote my final months on earth to sleeping in perfectly clean white bedsheets everynight and taking twice as long to select music to listen to and movies to watch because every second should be sublime. the third i resign from midway through. i tell him/her, who knows, that after months at the gym, i've finally put on the final 5 kilos required of me to be accepted into a professional wrestling organization and that they're paying for me to take acting classes with view to incorporating me into the show starting next season as a badass named Ateyour Mombo.

Le Moulin is playing on the ipod at that time so i decide to dress in a blue striped tshirt and i put on the hat that sits on top of my piano and has done so for the last year. i decide to pretend it's last year, so i put on the hat and sit quietly behind the piano. last year no one would have been home so i pause the ipod and take up at the next bar, playing it myself, quietly. with the practise pedal on so it doesn't disturb anybody. the nighttime likes it and i can feel a swell of darkness gather around the outside of my window as the night presses its cheek and ear to hear. she gets lonely walking the streets, i know that much about her. sees a light on, or hears a sound wants to see who's up.
___it's last year, so i still have a few friends. i dial a girl i know for no reason. just to get a response i tell her i'm a vampire, and vampires like having coffee at 2am. she says she'll have coffee with me. i'm so shocked i'm not sure what to do. she has on a black fake-leather jacket. something blue. shirt? maybe a sweater i don't know. i tell her i'm not interested in being her friend. she has to be my girlfriend and give me smoochies from time to time, or be my victim and let me suck some nominal blood from the back of her arm. she says she'll need time to think. fair enough i say.

my phone buzzes, i check the text:
i'm home alone. i have a bottle of champagne and toys. what are you doing? ;)

a year ago i didn't end up responding to that text. so tonight i delete it. get back to whatever i've been doing. reading. reading. reading. my eyes overheat. bad radiator or something. dry as weeds i drip drops into them all day. people ask me what it is i answer narcotics, eyes are the closest thing to your brain. your optical nerve travels a few inches up your nose straight into your brain. in 12 minutes i'll be Robinson Crusoe i won't give a f*ck about you. they don't seem to believe me. (the wresting-acting classes must not be working).

a year ago i'd probably not write to you. i'd find the half-drank bottle of dark rum i had hidden somewhere. listen to New Slang by the Shins on repeat. drink until i felt sleepy enough to sleep. this is what happens when you run out of diazepam. where're my pills? mom asked. gone. long long long gone. for the record she'd stolen them out of my grandfather's medicine drawer. after he passed away, knowing the value of an 8 year old one-third full bottle of benzodiazepines, we raided his house, every cuboard, drawer, under the bed. old boxes. what have you got mom? she didn't have anything. lots of warfarin. you? nothing useful. maybe i'd change the song though. after a while. Glorybox by Portishead for a while. Slow Show by the National. Eva Cassidy singing Autumn Leaves. drink till you sleep. only way out of it. when you wake up, your eyes are red, and the ground's been pulled up on one side it's annoying as hell and the guy from across the street crashed into the back of your car on his way to work. good morning world. good to be back. (maybe Birds by Electralene).


*___*___*

- Q-zee, what can i say?, i like the guy. and let's face it, we're not getting any younger here are we?
- no we ain't.
- no we ain't. anyway, his tour finishes in like november. and i'll be back in december. so i'll see him. we actually live kinda close. and... we'll just see what happens.
- sounds... prudent.
- prudent?
- came to mind.
- it's like the least romantic, least sexy word you could have thought of.
- love is like the least romantic, least sexy thing i can think of.
- when did you get all post-modern commitment-phobe on me?
- when post-modernism caught up with me.
- ...
-...
- he has lots of tattoos. couple of 'em i don't like.
- no one's got it all [i mumble this]
- what?
[i sing for her:

it's alright it's alright it's alright it's alright,

no one's got it all.
no one's got it all.
no one's got it all.

- [laughing] what the hell are you, are you singing!

i'm the hero of this story
don't need to be saved
i'm the hero of this story
don't need to be saved

i'm the

______(no one's got it all)


*___*___*

2:43am.

what now.