Aaaahhhh. everything (why i cannot write)

____we will not be the last
____we will not be the last
____we will not be the last
____we will not be the last

________Bloc Party











untitled, [Brett Walker]

there is death. which falls out of the sky. which is counterintuitive, since i always imagined it sprouting from underneath our feet, like Easter Lilies around our ankles. like little clouds. and we slowly sink in. but, also, it can work the other way. falling from the sky like a rejected cloud falling thanks to the same-old gravity we all know by first name. spontaneous and free as just that: falling. (out) of the sky. something just landing on our doorstep (and that something is not being). and if people wanna keep falling dead out of the sky, i don't know how if i concentrate on what's in front of me.
________(and for all the things that might fall, ducks, and Zeus's lightnight bolts, and hail, i don't think there could have been a brighter star to have been extinguished than Khash Khatami)

then there is black water. it is everywhere, can't you see it? it's there. when i drive (day and night), i see it slowly creeping from the edge of the roads so i feel like there are river banks everywhere who suddenly seek my company. (a coldness to it too, and i sleep shirtless and wake every morning when for an hour it gets cold enough to warrant something other). you just need to be loved. by everyone. all the time. that's your problem. (who left that window open?) (you need to stop peaking in. it takes all the fun out of me when you know everything well in advance) and the thing is q, it's ok to just be yourself. i don't know who's convinsed you that you isn't enough, but it is. it's more than enough. (and the problem with not remembering who you are.were.want to be, is that all the other options don't quite fit right in your skin and there are sharper little bits that stick out and baggy sags as well. and if i morph another couple of times i'll lose it for sure, and will be autumn without the leaves and winter with a cold, relentless, austere sun (like an old woman's face, white and chiseled and unforgiving), and summer without the sound of the ocean, and spring without a single carnation or daisy and not a man blowing his nose from hayfever anywhere to be found. it will be damnation.

(what i'm trying to say is:
i'm freaking out a bit. it doesn't look, smell or fewl like 2007. nothing about it. it flows nicely. people are falling out of the sky. in 2007 they sank slowly till they suffocated. now they just fall and cuts are sharp and swift. that's fine. also, it flows nicely (did i just say that?). i am happy amongst myself and look forward to empty rooms and am half-tempted to just turn my phone off and disconnect my internet to preserve the littleness of me-ness i've finally discovered living in a quiet space somewhere inside myself. (a part of me i haven't tarnished beyond repair, he's an old man, living silently in a cave where he'd hoped to get past these last years undetected. i've found him and am slowly re-learning his language. asking him to inform me how it was things were. who it was i used to be. and how to do that again.

of course i did something 'naughty' the other day and everyone presently hates me. they'll get over it. (07's and 08's are sending ghosts back. terminator's from another time. these are wishing wells with very strong grips. i need to navigate it away from myself. i need to navigate sadness and paranoia and all those yesterdays that do. not. exist. anymore. away from myself. i need to charter busses and jets and rafts that cross dark rivers, and load all the old me's onto them, all the old names, memory, faces, books, ideas, bad-Q! bad-Q!, substances, airless windowless rooms, hatred, fear, self-loathing, history, all me, all 2008, all 2007, they need to be expelled. absolved. abrogated.

nothing i find, no tree or Bacardi or patch of skin (soft soft soft) is going to repatriate me. i am home, but blind. (not: homeless and sightful). i am inverted. upside down. backasswards. retrograde. differentiated. recast. tarnished and sullied by the unfortunate happening of life.

this last week, this weekend, the wedding- and all those hearts beating together in one room, on dancefloors, holding each other, and sitting besides each other at tables, and my friend dying inexplicably (the one heart that stopped beating)... everything i love and hate about life. side by side. as usual. the god i hate, and the God i love. the life i loathe. and the life that fills me with Wonder and Inspiration, and a will to wake up. the q that can't stand on his own feet (yet). and can't manage excitement without breaking something (and just so you know, i was naughty, and no one's talking to me at present), and the Q that knows nothing but love. and friendship, and can't wait to be himself, because he wants to know what words his future.babies will mispronounce so he can giggle and not-correct them and fill a notebook with them (and sit in bed at night wondering how best to phonetically transcribe their too.gorgeous sounds) and fill tape recorders with them so he can montage them into a video, and if i die, just in case, here's what i want you all to know, (just in case), (when healthy 28-year-old's heart's start failing randomly in the evening, who knows what could happen) ... (during my
jog yesterday i was covered in the sweat of fear. any moment now. for no reason at all. it could. it did. maybe it could did again)


____1. in between prayers, there must be music. nclude: the slow movement of Ravel's Piano concerto in G, Part's Spiegel im Spiegel, Thomas Tallis's O Salutaris hostia, and two Bach minuets from Anna Magdelena's notebook, g minor and d minor. played in full. i don't care if people are bored, they need to hear these things once in their life.

____(make sure at least one prayer for Praise and Gratitude is said)

____2. if my mom and sister are unhappy, tell them i've never been soo happy in all my non.life. also, tell them: i win!

____3. dress to impress fools.

____4. no speeches. no obituary. (but maybe read Tennyson's Ulysses... or, here read this (and make sure someone who knows how to read Cummings reads it. If Anjie's there give it to her):

________i thank You God for most this amazing
________day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
________and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
________which is natural which is infinite which is yes

________(i who have died am alive again today,
________and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth
________day of life and love and wings:and of the gay
________great happening illimitably earth)

________how should tasting touching hearing seeing
________breathing any--lifted from the no
________of all nothing--human merely being
________doubt unimaginable You?

________(now the ears of my ears awake and
________now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

(and that makes me smiley enough to manage the rest of my reading in preparation for my Contracts tutorial)

Thursday, January 15th, 2009

All Thursdays maybe speak today's language,
the sun that arranges itself like long peeled lemon rinds
___between our feet and across our tables in jagged shapes,
and the wind stands up for itself only silently,
___in gentle sign-language telling my skin "it'll be ok,
___and summer is here, but can't do too much harm long as i am".
Terracotta tiles motionless like oranges in trees marked in place,
table-tops and the skin of women passing radiate a different warmth,
that of a thing alive.
_______like, finally, me.

protrait & letter. (to q). (on his birthday)

That's what it is, a sigh of sleeping giantness

That causes turbulence even in the shy, still unused fields
Stacked to the horizon, not even waiting, secure

In their inertia. A force erupting so violently
We can't witness any of it. Best to leave it alone

And start it all over again, if there's a beginning.
The stalk is withered dry, my love, so will our heart decay.

Unless we omitted something. And we did. It'll cure it.
It will have to. But I can't whisper that story yet.

_________________________________________________________________from Forgotten Song, John Ashberry



PORTRAIT.

you are everything they forgot to say you're not. you are the clown-show and the massacre and the carnival and the funeral march. you are heavy as lead and solid as clay and dark as wet tree trunks and caustic and biting as the Prague snow creeping its way from your toes up your ankles. you are the dreams your father had of you when you were nothing but an idea, and before that, you are the first lines of the dreams god had of you when you weren't even an idea yet. when you were completely you, formed as a cloud and imbibed into air and rain and god took you and passed light through you and your lips were the red of a rainbow. and half the time your heart is still the blue of the sky.

you are errors in the sequence of time, you drag it down and slow it and speed it up and throw it back around on itself so it spins in loops like when you played with glowing sticks from the campfire as a child. (when you threw every object you could find into the fire to watch it burn into different shapes and shades of red and white and grew sick from the fumes). everynight you disrobe yourself back into your constituent memories. your history is the parchment of your skin. your eyes say more than enough. your mouth is useless, a vessel you use to hide and distract. you never catch anyone staring at your hands and that makes you sad. and all things make you sad, so you build dams and bridges to navigate your sadness away from itself.

you think making love is the same as listening to music, alone, late at night, since love is love and when made right: is invisible to eye and body (since skin merging with skin is how souls embody one another). everything you hope for is made of love. or combined to form it. or taken apart to reveal it, growing, softly and tenderly, like a pure white root the color of an easter lilly.

and when all those dreams made of history slowly grew arms and legs and teeth and spoke their first words (which dad says were: what's this?), and grew to hate and love and fear and aspire to sublimity, aspire to weightlessness, and grew deep as fractal geometry, when age encountered its own division, time amongst time gives time and time remains still more, always leftover seconds that could have been something they're not and never are going to be (and Martha says this to me and i never tire of hearing it, say it again, say it always: it could never have been anything else. it could never have been anything else), when that happened, we played the roles we played. we played lover. and friend. and passionate lover. and devoted son. and mourning brother. and we played helper, and we played helped. we cried on phones and we held hands. we issued warnings and we took walks and we stared at snow and wondered about the whiteness of the place we came from when we were dream inchoate. when we were so pure as to not have ideas and dreams and hopes and slept peacefully in our insubstantiate oblivion. when i slept as nonexistence how sweet i was. how silent, and how gorgeous. how peaceful. with eyelashes made of others' lives.

and you wrote words of it. a journal of time. a time machine to remind you of birds on wires and the color of women's backs that you kissed, and through the open window it was all moonlight and dark night and in the streetlights said farewell to. and you wrote of it to escape it and found it there, holding a box full of itself (wrapped in time, delicious and assiduously present).

you see yourself as flesh and connective tissue. as wrangled dream and potential energy (plates suspended mid air, always liable to fall, and for all its cracks, still held together). you see yourself as drifting through gravity's delicate web. you see yourself as responsible and victim. you see yourself at the center of everything. you are the flower and the daydream. you are the genocide and the corn-stalk. you are the sound of train and the refraction of light. you are everything Bach hoped for in a listener, and everything god hates to see in a man. you are all boy and no man. and all geriatric and no child. and all juvnile and not a tooth of wisdom to you. and you are all story, all fable, a whole mythology condensed into the shape of yourself. your shadow is soo black it redefines color. you are the sort of miracle no one notices.

you are pain and redemption to all who know you. you are agitation and vexation and you argue over nothing and are nothing and mean nothing, and yet, somehow, still managed to pull together enough carbon to exist. you are a tree that lost its herd. and you bide your time, till to the soil you return, relearning how to transform your two hands back into roots of lillies, and your teeth the blossoms of cherries, and your eyes into fields of snow broken hearted lovers will cry in.

life is just moving from dream to history. (and all in between must only be love or circumstance)


LETTER.

dear q,

dear new man made of old man. dear childish man. dear unlearning man. dear constantly mistaking man. dear forgetting relearning always remembering man. dear too fully loving apathetic not certain up from down man. dear man who misses all the things he remembers to miss.

in two hours you will be born again. newest again. unmistaken as the 26th you. the pinnacle of you yet achieved. the best we've ever had. the most hammered and bandaged you we've ever seen. the born-again. the resurrected. you are the son of you. the father of you. you con.trans.substantiate yourself. the heamaphrodite you.

i haven't a clue who you want to be as 26q. i know you have your ideas. i know you want to develop a certain weightlessness. a certain unencumberedness. i know you plan on filling voids. i know you plan to releiving yourself of godfulness. i know you plan on finally grasping the sharpness of your eyes. i know you plan on evening out the knives of your temper. i know you want to make love, to books and ideas and poems and people. i know you miss the smell of women's hair and their weight lying besides you. i know you think driving fast with the windows down is as close to flying as you will get. i know you sense your own newness. i know you can't notice your frowns and your cut hands and the skin you burnt last week has all peeled away now.

i wish you luck old new young man. i wish you antigravity. and volition. i wish you immersion in your own skin. i wish you embodiment in your own skin. i hope you are you to the fullest of your capacity. i hope you are you in the clearest and most precise way. i hope you speak like you and walk like you and pray like you and move like you and even, when no one is looking, dance like you in ways you've never managed before. i hope you can divide by smaller numbers and approximate to more digits who it is you were meant to be. i hope you can climb the mountains you've made inside your chest, and i hope you can bury the fingertips and liptips and hairtips of the things you blame yourself for. i hope you redeem all the debts you think you owe. i hope you find grass. and flawlessly blue skies. i hope the sound of the ocean stops frightening you. i hope you sleep long, impregnable black sleeps. dreamless sleeps. unfettered youness.

dearest q...

i want you to fade into black. (and be indistinguishable from the passage of time. and memory. and mostly, i want you to be love incarnate.

much love always.
q.

things related to this photograph (fragments)

courtesy ghetto blaster

POSSIBLE TITLES FOR THIS PHOTO:

____- you're late
____- things that happened outside my window while i stayed in bed because i had nothing to do on sunday morning
____- fall autumn fall
____- where you are and i'm not
____- slow, silent;
____- promises i failed to keep
____- i remember it because it rained that day
____- wonderland
____- the persistence of history
____- four invisible figures and the bus is on time
____- please god, please
____- we are also what we have lost

STORIES INVENTED TO EXPLAIN SAID PHOTOGRAPH:


____i.
and we'll meet
yes we'll meet
there, we'll meet there
yes, there. exactly
right.
and when we do-
________when we do everything will be alright.
all. right.
right; like drawers that slide nicely on their rails.
are we really gonna do this?
we already have. this is the way we're remembering it.


____ii.
by my second year of university i was fully depressed. like an anachronistic vitelloni i sat everyday besides the plastic drop-sheet of the outdoor cafeteria, watching droplets of rain take aim at my face and get as close as the width of the plastic sheet. i drank hot chocolate and read. and wrote. and at the end of the day, all wet tables and chairs, and the color of the cement almost shiny, i'd be the last to leave. and i'd leave. and no one would have noticed either way. that's what it was. those were the times.


____iii.
it is your city now. completely. you have made it home and owned it and taken all those steps people take as life moves (forward). if it is a place i land one day, there will be no confusion: i was late. you did what you had to do. you got to the line, and won, and are the embodiment of happiness. i'm something that lurks in your past, and no doubt, you keep off to one side like soo many of your secrets. and when i walk, i'll keep my eyes planted to the ground in front of me, out of reverence.


____iv.
the water makes puddles and rivers of everything. it is genesis everyday for ants and ladybugs. colors are different, and the sky exhales an ocean. whole futures are made in moments like these. silently. during quiet afternoons. in private little rooms, with second-hand furnishings and too many clothes on the ground. people's lives exist in those spaces. and as time decidedly moves forward, the people in those spaces are reduced to phantasms and ghosts and memories and back into solid shapes and end in words without meaning all at once. futures lost and found that we'll never even look up to notice.

Things That Make It Ok, a List:

____1. heaven is most memorable at night. and when it rains,
________there, (that place), castles of sound and exhaled humidity,
________is a home i can live with. in. amongst. am.

____2. and a freshly washed car, driving too fast, music too loud, heaters on and windows down and windows up and heaters down and wind real and imaginary, and the fluid feel of highways and sharp turns and the girl from MacDonalds who smiles at me and everything that goes into forgetting time and place and selfdom for a few moments

____3. my wall stands proud. my baby i call it. all throughout i would say see my baby growing? everytime a new row was placed. and i could feel it digging into the 50 or so tonnes of dirt it holds back. i made Atlas's back. two kinks, his vertebra. does it make me more man if i have built a wall? perhaps not. (but it does help with my longstanding gender issues)

____4. tomorrow (today actually, it's passed midnight) a new(est) future begins. a new me. i am bloodthirsty for the future. challenging it. taunting it.

____5. the new(est) Q. it's nice to be a new man. with untested limits, unexpected reactions, surprising moments of tenderness and wisdom and frustration. from within i am learning who this new man is.

____6. martha's prints have now been reframed. they look the way i always wanted them to look. they hang besides my bookshelf. it is a nook. it is my (current) favorite place in the world.

____7. "you know, i'm starting to love this house."
"yeah?"
"yeah."
"what's changed?"
"i know the floors better than anyone. everywhere it's not perfect... the hollow spots, the perfect angles, the chipped corners. i know the sliding door got flipped. i know which screws are threaded and if anyone tries to remove them they're in for a heck of a ride. i know this house like an anatomist."
"does that make it a home?"
"it... just... might."
"that's good right?"
"i don't know. i won't know what to do with it."
"what does anyone do with a home?"
"they use it as a pivot."
"what does that mean?"
"i think it means i'm not falling anymore."

____8. mostly it's just this:

____i'm ready.
____bring it.
____(whatever it is)

Ways of Doing Irreperable Damage to Your Body, a List:

____1. challenge Mike Tyson to a 2 round hit-me-as-hard-as-you-can-athon.
____2. get married. get fat. get bald. pretend it's all good.
____3. develop and nurture a hearty drug addiction. if the crack cocaine doesn't manage to wear you out, eating insects and living under abandoned bridges ought to do the trick.
____4. become a hippie. the sandals will hurt your toes, the hemp clothes will give you rashes, the ideology will molest your mind- but mostly, the diet will morph you into a herbivorous barosaurus (an enormous plant eater with a tiny head)
____5. go to Haifa and eat anything at all. wait 4 months. you will now begin sprouting hair and growing bulbous masses out of every orifice.
____6. build the following retaining wall in 48 hours starting at 7am on a friday and ending at 10pm on a saturday:

















(thanks for your patience to everyone who hasn't gotten a text, email, or general response from me in a little while. i love you all. also i can't feel my hands or stand up straight. when i recover i'll hit ya'll back)

Lists

Originally uploaded by yosoylete

Places I Have Found Whilst Trying to Find My Way (Elsewhere) (In General) (help), A LIST:

____1. the Third Ear, Haifa Israel, (the best video store on planet earth)

____2. Marilyn, Adelaide Australia (a brothel. i thought it was a club)

____3. From Dusk Till Dawn, Adelaide Australia (also a brothel. i thought it was a club)

____4. 29, Brisbane Australia (also also a brothel. i had no idea what it was)

____5. Venice Beach, Los Angeles USA (i don't know where i was trying to get to)

Things.Words.Phrases I Use Too Much, A LIST:

____1. totally

____2. dude

____3. seriously hey. (also: seriously) (also: hey)

____4. that's what she said

____5. yo

____6. fu*&

____7. this is what we do

____8. ay Khoaddayyih buzorg (oh great/large Lord)

____9. big boos

____10. also

____11. shoot me in the face

____12. whatever

A Couple of Inanimate Objects I Have Loved (Effusively), & What Came Of Them, A LIST:

____1. 6th Grade, my Phenoix Suns basketball cap with the purple visor and black with white stripes top. it was my 11th birthday present. was stolen off my head as i boarded the train at Brighton Station on my way home from school one friday. i cried and was miserable. it had cost my parents $40 (an exorbitant price for my family at that time). they bought me a second one. i wore it till the colors faded all to brown, and lined with the salt of my recess lunchtime runaround sweat, and blurred dyes all mixing with one another. my father still has it and sometimes even wears it to my great embarrassment.

____2. the red and black backpack i brought with me to Haifa, with the perfect padding so that your back doesn't get sweaty even if you're walking around Bangkok in 38 degree weather with physically impossible humidity levels. continued to use until the main zip broke. still continued to use. the second zip broke. also one of the supports so that i could only hang it from one shoulder. still continued to use. finally discarded it. in my office where i could still see it everyday. finally discarded it in a bin. as a token of mourning used only plastic bags for the better part of 28 months i remained in Haifa.

Places in the World I Would Prefer To Live (Over the Gold Coast), A LIST:

____1. Islamabad

____2. New York

____3. Bangkok (even with the brick throwing anarchy)

____4. L.A.

____5. Paris

____6. a refugee camp in Darfur

____7. Fallujah

____8. the dining room of a vegan restaurant

____9. London (even though after 12 hours in London I'm ready to shoot myself in the face from loneliness)

____10. Haifa (or Tel Aviv)

____11. an ill-constructed igloo on a sheet of arctic ice that due to global warming (ie impending apocalyptic doom) will soon break away and float me off into oblivion

____12. Kashmir, Kosovo, Jerusalem, other highly contested patches of earthless land

____13. a decrepit cold war apartment block building with no heating with 15 other squatters around an almost aflame tin can in St. Petersburg during perpetual December