Walking In Los Angeles by Kate Micucci

notpoems

i.
when i wake up i cannot move.
i try stretching, playing my piano, religion;
fantasies about braiding black hair,
about adopting a mountain range, counting
all the things i've lost and found.
so i sit on my couch.
stare out the window, watch it rain in summer.


ii.
donuts. frozen drinks that you slurp till your brain hurts.
chocolate bars. my blood thick and heavier from the sugar.
(muffins the size of baby's heads and cupcakes dainty and
gorgeous as Marie Antoinette) so thick it can't be pumped,
i'm cut and bleed in gelatinous raspberries. emerald and
candied geraniums. i smile and put it to my lips.

do you need gas? she asks as i pull in and stop the car
nono, craving cookies. (yumyumyum)


iii.
it's nothing, it's a hole in my middle name.

i am a ghost ; to many people, i am a foreign long-distance oh-yeah-remember-him? name.
former once-upon-a-time girlfriends who might from time to time remember my hands on
their waists and feet they'd never let me kiss. former how's-about-a-time roommates who i slummed with and ate $5 noodles sitting on the side of the road at 2am

it is weird to not exist to so many people.

i am introduced to her. i say hello, she asks to hear my name again, i say: for your whole life you'll remember a sunday afternoon when i watched from the hallway you come out the shower and put on your underwear. and the window was half open so the milk grey sad rained on dream of afternoon infected our lives forever more and you turned and saw me and picked up your lotion and and held it out to me. ___she asks about my name again, but i've already told her all she'll ever remember.


iv.
you should be standing on your own two feet by now.
that sounds lonely. __standing on just two feet. __i think i prefer to stand huddled together,
standing on the backs and shoulders and feet of people who love me.

(and when i walk i hear a small army every step i take)

3 petit pieces : a response to MB

allison in london 2011 by lina scheynius



i. the furies

it got noisy. sometime post-youth this was. felt like wind, someone had left a window open in my head and the buzz of it ... couldn't hear a damn thing. so i sat in quiet spaces and listened to it, like deciphering the rain (which is also possible with enough time and skills in cartography). they were murmurs. little snippets of voices. ostinato words that i didn't quite, couldn't quite want to make out. home home home. that's an example. words that had no meaning. the ghosts of words. memories i wasn't ready to dispense with. phantoms of myself. buzzing and humming.
___and just like that it'd all be silent again. smile-worthily silent.

and just like that (again), i'd hear it. distant at first. Sartre's flies. a hum. micro-conversations i've had/hadn't had/couldn't have/didn't want to have/wouldn't have had if i'd known/didn't know not to have had/ bleeps and blurps and mixed up with images of skinny girls' wrists and single high heels on my floor i'd kick on my way to the bathroom in the dark at night ; houses i'd lived in, rooms with no windows, Haifa's geraniums, yellow couches we kissed on, the whiteness of breasts in the moonlight, like bones or clouds made of dead gossamer ... and all the words it takes to say those things scrambled and mashed, here it comes now, like waves waves waves upon a shore, or knowing you're about to fall down some stairs .:: the buzz grows , fractal geometries ..::: closer now ;: dispense with formalities, when it hits i'll sink into a corner and stare off into nothing like a junkie or a tulip in a coma till


___and just like that it'd all be silent again. smile-worthily silent.

(these are not the kind you see. except to see them coming)


ii. by the river i sat down and wept

he hands me an empty bottle and asks me to comment, i tell him i cannot, which does not please him. but the party rages on. all around me. youth, or some similar tragedy with a rhyming nickname. and i follow my shoes around and try not to notice all the things i notice which make me feel a gajillion miles away in another galaxy somewhere where all of this makes as little sense to everyone as it does to me.
a girl approaches me, a little tipsy and fingernails painted what colour are your nails?
- that's a lame question to start off with.
- that's a shame, i was hoping you'd say 'tangerine dream'.
- what?
- your nails. 'tangerine dream'. or maybe 'psychedelic ruby'.
- that might work, psychedelic ruby.
- you're a psychedelic ruby.
- you're weird.
- better that than the alternative.
- which is what?
- unsmoochable.
- are you hitting on me? why do i feel like you're hitting on me?
- i want to smooch you, and then ask you questions.
- why not ask first?
- if you give unsatisfactory answers then your smoochfulness may vanish

(after i get lost between the magic of her long neck and red hair and her breathy alcohol breath that rises and falls here and there ; people walk past us, and i'm a little sweaty and i'm uncomfortable with my pants still on with the sudden lack of space in my pants - so i pull off, and say hey space cadet, she looks up waiting for the next question ... are you happy?
(these being words that have made her sad) (which i don't understand because this is the germ cell of every question anyeveryone's ever asked anysomeone else. if not that then what else? by now she's repacked herself into herself and gone to blahblahblah.
my sweat subsides and i can move in my pants again. my shoes move and i follow, and about a zillion miles away the true me is sitting reading something interesting in the quiet and i am saved from myself and all this.
___hey q, you leaving? i'm asked by the front door; but how can i comment on that effectively? empty and empty i respond ; which makes no sense to him, but which means quite simply: but i was never here.


iii. run. rabbit.

having stated the facts in clear chronological order, i suspected i would receive suitable advice. but he just sat there and stared at me. i indicated that the future is wordless by not saying anything. but representing it in silence. i stared back in other words. (and in other words i stare back all the time.) (that's what i do when i write. stare back. summon forth to me little damsels i have saved in the cozy bits of 2002 for my own personal remembrance)

the stage is set, but if it rains the whole thing will be wasted. i see a mime with a white painted face and he walks up to me and says if it rains we're all f&cked back to new caledonia. i ask him if there's not some way around it , couldn't you just pretend it wasn't raining? and he tells me he'll think it over in the restroom. ___(a few minutes later he returns). ___no he says. ___the performance is slipping up he says. i'm not sure what he means. he could very well mean the performance is the act of slipping up. he sees i'm evaluating the two options. he indicates he meant the whole thing, the whole show, the spectacle of the scaffold he says (by which i imagine he meant Friday 3:04am when i write this) is coming apart. he continues:

at the limbs is where you can see it most. severance. time starts to drift off. space (you get fearful of large spaces for a while. other times, the closet is suddenly not good enough. and age is age, and you bounce from birthday to birthday and realise somewhere between 26 and 28 you lost another hub cap and your mom calls everyday to see if you've found a job yet and you pop your pills like breath freshners and paint your happy face and walk out into monday mornings and thursday afternoons and eat burgers and sweet talk sweet looking girls into going to the movies with you and sooner or later you just realise being what the everyones are calling 'well' is a freaking mountain obstacle mission impossible to climb).

he'd keep on going but then we hear a deep rumble. thunder. well then he says, at last the time has come. sooner or later, the sky was always going to fall. i'm not sure if i agree with him on this point but he cuts off my thoughts :: heed well my advice young man. what follows is another round on the merry-go-round. you know where you are, you know the rest, you know all of everything. i disagree with this too, and i say but i know nothing.

he's walked away. he's moving briskly so he's far along already. he turns his head over his shoulder and shouts back: fine, try that one out then.

i'm not sure if i'd gone out looking for advice. but as it starts to rain, i'm pleased not to feel to cold about it all.

small stories.

and even if it's sunday may i be wrong
for whenever men are right they are not young
____ee cummings











untitled by buradori



to my right a girl sits eating in a black corset. to my left, another. more nude.

when i get into bed she automatically climbs over me, pushes me back into my own side. it's one clumsy motion, another of night's awkward fumblings. i kiss the back of her neck and she purrs.
i like that sound.
so i do it again.

the rain tries to fool me. i'm not fooled. the humidity gives it away. this is a ploy. a stratagem. i ignore it, waiting for the ghosts of the heat to seep out of the hot cement : the rough tar of roads and sidewalks : and drift off,

i am bored and tired of everyallthethings we bore and tire of. today i am bored and tired of Monday. i am tired of vacant spaces,
sometime between 9am and noon i resolve to lock myself in a room somewhere. switch off my phone. to rest in being alone.

when i awake i am scared i cannot love.
i cannot be in one place.
cannot admit satisfaction.

i am soo proud of you she says. she says you're really shining right now she says when you were in my class i saw hints of it, sometimes you showed signs of it, but... well done. i ignore the inadvertent diss, i say if i may inquire, to what do i owe your generous laudations? she laughs, i worded it humorously, but i was serious: i have no idea what she's talking about. she laughs and walks away.

if this is not my body then whose is it?

when you give a recital it is a strange feeling. you sit on the stool. sometimes you have to lift the lid of the piano. other times not. depends. my teacher always said hear the first bar in your head, sound it perfectly in your head before you put your hands on the keyboard. then it starts. it's a dance for your hands. it's odd because the rest of your body feels like it's just hanging around waiting. like when you wait for your centre-of-attention GF/BF to get done talking to his/her friends so you can leave. you kinda just sit there. on the stool. try not to look around. try not to look to out of place. i'd always say to myself your role is to sit here politely. you hear the sounds and think oh, nicely done right hand. nicely done. sometimes there's a mistake. snaps you out of it long enough to make a few changes (like adjusting sound on the stereo). then you go back to sitting politely. daaaaaaa - dum!.
then it ends. you stand up, wonder how it went. it sounds different from 20 feet and a body away, so who knows what they heard. __bow. __shuffle off stage.

the rain stops and summer's thick tongue takes a big lick and exhales.

i do not want to be here.
to know anyone.
i want to be in Vietnam,
amongst white flowers.

it is hard not being myself. __i am tired of waiting for the opportunity to catch-up to myself.
so i shower again. reassess my wardrobe. worry about the future. __measure stuff.

i enjoyed the King's Speech. __mostly i want to live in Lionel's chambers. with the wallpaper and the model plane hanging from the ceiling and the wide spaces and the dark wood and the fireplace. ____i want Thom Yorke to teach me to dance.

- are you happy?
- i am not unhappy.
- then what are you?
- i do not know a word for it.

time is making me claustrophobic. and agoraphobic. one or either. maybe both. both. definitely both. i'm not sure whether i have too much of it or too little. i think it's both. like those days you feel fat and skinny at the same time. fat in the wrong places, skinny in the wrong places. but with time. and space.

i'll get them framed later he thinks.
to which she responds but there are no photos of you around anywhere.
that's true. there aren't. so he says there are photos of my memories. that's almost true. it's true, bar one missing photo. he gave one away. it is important to do that, once in a while. to give away something that means the world to you. give someone your version of the world. nice thought. a little jupiter-photo, a dusty saturn-ornament.

it is very Euripides. yes. i know, we've covered that ground already. but the furies, i can hear them. almost wish to hear them. maybe this time it's not even them, it's just me. it's the hum in my head. wants to run. move. relocate. scrub. restart. calibrate. purge. exorcise.

maybe though.
maybe what?
just maybe.
what ever. __so what's next?
the thing.
what thing?
whichever thing. the everyanynothing.
are you gonna have trouble sleeping tonight?

i cannot act this well for too much longer. __there must be some water here somewhere.

...

untitled by irwin romain jules arthur



THINGS I WOULD INCLUDE IN THE STORY I WOULD HAVE WRITTEN IF I FELT LIKE WRITING A STORY (WHICH I DON'T), A LIST:

different coloured books, stacked some horizontal, some vertical, at first glance haphazardly on white shelves. but on closer look coloured, thematic, chronological organizational schemes start to appear. on an even closer look the schemes fall apart. on an even closer look coloured, thematic, chronological ... repeat.


i've lost that sense of home again. i had for a while. but it's gone now. everything feels foreign. it's all very Sartre (unfortunately). __i cannot sit through too many more classes. __or dinners. my house irritates me. i'm soo bored driving to and fro i speed just to put myself out of the burden of it.


a shopping trolley. kicking it. over. over. again. and over. and over. always wanted. over. to. again. over. over. again. and. again over. over.


maybe it should be set in summer. i hate summer. too much light. can't see a thing. always squinting, sweat dripping down my temples, drops on the inside of my lenses. my glasses always dirty. bright as all hell. can't bear to be outside, the air soo heavy you need a straw to breathe it in.


bad writers. bad writing. to make up for it they were tighter jeans. if can't act the part might as well look it. sitting in cafes. drinking soy somethings or another. complaining about irreparable environmental damage. __either that or throw together a couple hackneyed similes, slap a rhyme on the end and give it to a girl so she'll feel pretty and let you kiss her later and later into the night till there's simply no alternative left. (if can't act the part might as well abuse it). bad writers. bad writing. mostly by people who have bad haircuts.


distance. can't decide from what though. __from the future maybe. __also from the past. there's nothing further than the past. it's an impossibility away. distance from yourself ; even in the present. that mixed up mumjumbled wha tha feeling like you just woke up can't make a decision about anything so you just sit there staring away hoping it'll all just keep managing itself like it has for ever and ever.
distance. __that much is clear. __the rest...


a hospital. someone probably works there. i'm tempted to say it's a she. but then for fun it'll probably be a he. not a doctor or anything though. maybe in the cafeteria. maybe this guy wheels a portable television around from room to room for patients whose tvs have stopped working. room number. push. leave. collect. room number. again. again. white pants. the funny smell of the place. funny strange looks on people's faces. sick children are too sad to think about. he concentrates on how hard it is to find parking around the hospital. he hates parking. he drives his mother's van. the central locking doesn't work anymore. it smells like suburbia. there's a half-full bottle of water somewhere when he drives he can hear it rolling around. he never bothers to find it and remove it because ... ... because ... ... ... who knows.


nights we can't be alone but can't bear the sight of a person or the noise or movement of them. are thankful just to get home and close the door behind us. __when i was 16 i got my first notebook. it had a blue cover. somewhere inside it i wrote the line: i let my beasts eat me because they say i taste good. i still do. funny what a little flattery will do for ya.


if i wrote a story it would be like Hospice by the Antlers. fuzzy. but with clear melodies. several voices. i've never bothered to listen to the lyrics. i have no idea what they're on about. i just like the fuzziness. the melody. it's what i listen to when i'm sad. it's perfect for that. i feel like i'm being told a story. something about a hospital i assume.


there would be an after-shot. a '20 months after'. everyone would be ok. it's important that the reader is reminded that more or less, people are ok.
but still, sadder or stronger or farther away thanks to the experience. (distance).


no sex. __no love. __i've already made my money off those two. __this would be platonic.
platonic is under-rated. i'm bothered that it's easier to get laid than to make a friend. that makes me feel distant (except i don't know from what <-- but that's the point right?). she works at a carwash. on the weekends. that's where they met. (his mom was coming home for a visit so he had the mama-van washed). she didn't wash it though, she works the till inside. sells gum, old donuts. that kind of thing. __during the week she works as some blahh or another.
they have friends. as in... people that blahblahblah to each other, and drink on weekends and talk about that bitch or television shows or whatever it is friends talk about. but that doesn't fix anyone's loneliness - i'm sure it causes it more often than anything. __fuzzy. fuzzy lives. just kinda rolling along. you wake up knowing you have to get dressed but not sure why, next thing you know you're reading someone's left-over paper with your lunch, except you're not reading you just have your eyes set on it so they don't have to look around, after that you regain consciousness because you need to pee really bad, after you wash your hands you walk back out into the hall, it's almost dark when you find yourself trying to find the keys to your car. __wtf.


sometimes i get panicky about receiving text messages. i get nervous about hearing the noise. i don't know why. it terrifies me. i dread it. i turn my phone on silent and hide it somewhere where i won't hear it and where no one will hear me and know where i am and come find me and force me to talk to them or listen to them or know their name or make decisions or accompany them somewhere or be responsible or save money or get a job or be an 'adult' and get married and have babies and be a good person all those things they thought my parents would have instilled in me.


she gets drunk and cries to some guy she's never met before and tells him she ruined it for everybody. that she wasn't good enough to have been on the team and she knew all along she couldn't keep up but that she couldn't admit that to anybody least of all herself. so she stuck it out and basically ran the rest into the ground. she cries to the first guy but he has a GF so he leaves eventually. she plays the card on a second, who just doesn't really care. a third is found who doesn't care either (only it confirms what everyone around town had been saying anyway) but takes her home anyway. figures it's what she's after anyway. she is. except she's not. but she doesn't know that at the time. or for a few years yet.


i don't know of any story that has a start or an end. they just kinda pick it up somewhere and drop it off somewhere. it's just what they are, how they are. just distance between points.

apennyfortheoldguy exists again

Book, let me walk on the roads
with dust in my shoes
and without mythology:
return to your library,
I'm going out into the streets.

__from Ode to the Book (1) by Pablo Neruda














i see you by frederico erra


believe me. i'm as surprised as you are. __i was wondering how long it would take me to work up the courage to come back here. __(and if there'd be anything new to say) __(is there ever?)

let's just do this once, and then we can all move on:
the Phillip C Jessup International Law Moot is no joke okay. you might think there's time for things like brushing your teeth and writing on your blog, but there's not. there just isn't. so i did that. and that did me. and now we're both sick of one another, and at long last i've come back to my infinitely silent little place on the internet. if i haven't responded to your emails, your text, your call, your... everything, then, please please accept my apologies. six months it's been since i've been on your planet. where i was before was somewhere else. far far away. unless you've been there you wouldn't believe me.
i've just come back and i don't believe me.


*___*___*

so. someone remind me how this thing works. i remember the process, pick an image, pick a random sentence, the rest kinda just happens how it wants.


*___*___*

everyone i grew up with is pregnant. __it was raining. i remember that. __five months i've misplaced somewhere. doesn't seem like much, __but there's a scariness to knowing you misplaced yourself. __and then you wake up and remember all your friends are pregnant and Martha got married, and GF was gone for 3 months and came back without me really noticing, __and i had a 4 day break at some point which consisted of me sleeping. i think i woke up 4 times to eat. cereal. bowl. milk. back to sleep.

i find myself sitting thinking about who i was before, who i am after. i think it's the same. the very same. just that for a few months in the middle i was ...


*___*___*

it's coming back slowly though. __took me a week to kill the spiders in my house. __i shower four times a day , just to make sure i'm alert.
i have a to-do list. __but i move slowly.

i want to write. but i'm scared to. i'm not sure what i've hidden or where i've hidden it. not sure what the sentences will spell. maybe that's what the spiders were about. a portal-link between my psyche and the house i haven't slept in for weeks. baby spiders. everywhere. little freckles on every flat surface. i'm not scared of spiders really, but when the inside of your bedroom looks like a woman's freckled back, moving and breathing and conforming to your motions... it's creepy.

"hi is this pest-raid?"
"yes it is, how may i help you?"
"my bedroom is Jumanji"
"excuse me?"
"the amazon, it's in my bedroom. and spread to my living room too. can you come?"
"are there bugs?"
"yes. they've evicted me. i refuse to go back there."
"haha. okay, so what are we dealing with?"
"i need you to come."
"haha. we will, how bad is it?"
"do you have napalm?"
"haha. i don't think that will be necessary!"
"you keep laughing. i'm not laughing. we need napalm because it is too difficult to procure enriched plutonium nowadays."
"hahaha. okay okay, tomorrow, first thing? i'll change the schedules."
"now you're understanding me."


*___*___*

in about 8 weeks law school will be done. (bye law school, bye!)

the rest is unscripted.

i suppose we'll just do what we do. meet. smoochy. be dicks to one another. be lovely. get married. or not. get jobs we hate. find things we love doing. dance uncomfortably under strobe-lights and with manic glee around our bedrooms in our underwear. write songs about it. cheesy poems. make babies. stare at dogs at the pet store and contemplate buying one instead of making babies. stuff like that. jogging. running in circles, that's always necessary. take our pills, forget our pills, dream big, live small - fall big, live large ...

what does all this add up to? (Saturday February 12th i suppose).

i love Sinatra's little introduction before he starts singing Send in the Clowns. __someone should teach me to sing. __(or write) ____(or live)


*___*___*

i cleaned everything. under ever couch. vacuumed. sprayed. mopped. disinfected. washed everything.

then i sat on my couch. stared at my bookshelf. thought about April. __about May.

i thought about hiring someone to play somewhere over the rainbow on the ukulele so i could dance with my eyes closed and forget where i am. how far i am from who i am. (whatever that means).

one day i'll remember how to write again.

until then... i suppose we can all just listen to Scarborough Fair-Canticle by Simon & Garfunkel and dream of those quiet heavens that sometimes we stumble upon in the corners of our weekends when we hadn't expected to.

much love to you all,
i'm glad to be alive once again.
i hope you are too.

up day teh

one a scale of 1 to death: i'm still breathing. you decide.

my body stopped working yesterday about lunchtime. i came home and been asleep ever since. almost two days of it now. groggy and stumbly and i got a bunch of texts at some point with people complaining that i hung up on them but i don't remember any of that. it was raining at some point. i remember fantasizing about crawling out of my bed and on hands and knees crawling outside taking my clothes off on the way and digging a hole back into oblivion. i remember next waking up and it was dark. darker than i remember. it always confuses me when i fall asleep in the afternoon and wake up in the dark.

i've half-finished writing the case for the lawfulness of the 'war on terror'. sometime next week i will have to write the counter argument. then i'll sleep again.

GF: where were you?
Q: you know. doing... stuff.
GF: you can't do that. you can't disappear for days and not return calls or emails or anything.
Q: i told you i was checking out for a little bit
GF: checking out is fine, but you can't disappear.
Q: but you knew i what i was doing, i told you i was going to do it
GF: yes, fine, or a day or two or three i haven't heard from you in like a week. that's a long time.

i'm too tired to write more.
i'm going to go fall asleep again.