Things my future.wife should know, A LIST:

. Originally uploaded by snjezana.

1. i will always make you tea. (and yes, i will always want some myself)
   
   
2. i cannot be trusted to make my bed. it's been 25 years, it just doesn't really happen. i'm sorry. to make up for it, i can say confidently:
   
   
3. the toilet seat will always be put down
   
   
4. sometime between my writing this and my meeting you, i will conduct a rather intermediate-level research assignment on the Stalin years of the Russian Federation, and put into context all 15 of Shostakovich's symphonies and string-quartets, as well as discover the relationships and likes/dislikes of Stravinksy, Prokofiev, Khachaturian, Sviatoslav Richter, Scriabin, Emil Gilels, Oistrakh, Rostropovich, Rachmaninov, and Kabalevsky. I will be very affected by this assignment, and will probably be (even more) emotionally overcome when i listen to Shostakovich.
   
   
5. you will find that in the home, i rarely speak. this is normal. i'm recuperating from all the "obsequious banter" (source: Woody Allen) of the outside time. If you need my attention immediately, feel free to give me a bosom hug. i do notice those.
   
   
6. i despise cold houses. i'll work longer hours, i'll take a second job. whatever, but keep the heater on!
   
   
7. it is not unlikely that i will refer to you, my babies, and/or any of my loved friends and family as: jiggles, jiggly, munchy, fatty, fatso, babyface, fatface, joojeh-kebab, moooosh, or mooshface.
   
   
8. when i am writing, i will not hear anything you say. (if you need my immediate attention, refer to point 5, and approach with the intent of giving me a bosom hug)
   
   
9. when i am: sad, happy, unhappy, unsad, bored, excited, want-to-go-out, don't know what else to do, can't be bothered, have too much energy, need to be alone, want to sit next to someone, it's too cold out, it's too warm out, want to be with you in a way that's deeper and purer than talking to you about random nothing, don't want to be with you, need to think, need to laugh, need to be in someone else's world; i'll go to the movies.
   (unless if i'm already working a second job to pay for the heater to be on, in that case, i won't have any extra money to go to the movies)
   
   
10. please don't yell.
    
    
11. i feel it's important for children to enjoy and experiment on musical instruments. my babies are free to make whatever cacophonous racket they want on their pianos/guitars/bassoon/stringed-instrument, wind or brass, until they learn, discover, enjoy, creative, destroy, awaken again, misinterpret: diaphanous, exalted, sublime, unimpinged, unforgiving, perennial, mellifluous everything
    
    
12. i know i look silly when i do my monkey-dance, but it's ok to look silly when you're happy enough to do a monkey-dance. wanna do a monkey-dance with me? i promise it's fun.
    
    
13. you will have to learn to deal with the southpark. it's not going anywhere. to make it up to you, i will enthusiastically accompany you to whatever chick-flick is on that you want to see and don't have the courage to ask your friends to go with you to, and will not make fun of you for laughing. (ask mar, I watched the sisterhood of traveling pants with her, and liked it more than she did, and already bought my tickets to the opening screening of the sequel)
    
    
14. if you don't love West Wing, we can't be friends. i don't care what your opinions are on: Shostakovich, James Joyce, Rain vs. Sunshine, or the film Magnolia (which you'll annually have to sit through anyway), but West Wing is a deal breaker. How can you not like it? seriously?
    
    
15. i will always compliment your shoes, hair, dress. don't worry, if i don't like it, i'll find something else to compliment.
    
    
16. don't wear too much make-up. it makes you look worse.
    
    
17. when you're pregnant i'm going to spend alot of time touching your belly. it's half mine anyway. (also, since your breasts will have swollen, feel free to distract me from your belly with a bosom-hug)
    
    
18. i don't know why i feel so comfortable around books. i just do. i wish i didn't.
    
    
19. i hate crowds. but if it's important to you, i'll deal with it.
    
    
20. i will pick Japanese food over anything else. i get grumpy if i don't have sashimi once every 6 weeks. going out for breakfast is definitely the best time. i think it's important that we occasionally take a thermos of hot-chocolate to the park and play chess. when i'm scared, i won't tell you- you'll have to learn to work it out.
    
    
21. when i get nervous, agitated, scared, stressed for a period of time exceeding a week or so, my fingers will break out with small colorless pimples. you can tell that it's happened because i enjoy rubbing my fingertips on them (otherwise you won't see them). (i might joke that i'm turning into a lizard) (it goes away when things settle down again)
    
    
22. morning or evening, whichever works best for you- but we're going to say prayers together. if we don't have time, i'm going to call you at lunch and we're going to do it over the phone. i'm not kidding. it's important. i'll feel lonely if we don't.
    
    
23. i never fall asleep on the couch. i never sleep without brushing my teeth. i will change into my pjs the second i walk into the house
    
    
24. i forbid you from cooking and washing up on the same night. either i have to do one, or we do them together. (or let's make babies and have them do all of it)
    
    
25. i will touch your feet too much. for some reason i picked up the subconscious idea along the way that the touching of feet was incredible intimate and domestic sort of thing to do. i want to be intimate and domestic with you.
    
    
26. there are no exceptions, if i don't have any enough sleep, i seriously cannot operate. i will collapse mid-anything.
    
    
27. i don't feel comfortable in pubs. just know.
    
    
28. all members of my family must wrestle, play-fight, and do thumb-of-war secretly under tables when they get bored. all i'm saying is... you've been warned. if the 2-year old tries to body-slam you, you've been warned.
    
    
29. it's not that i 'don't mind' electronic music, i freaking love it. if you want to conduct an academic discourse on the relative merits of electronic music, i am more than happy to sit down and do that.
    
    
30. i don't do pranks. i don't like pranks.
    
    
31. children should go to a school with a uniform. summer dress, winter skirts with shirts and ties for girls. for boys: cleanly shaven, tie, shirt, trousers, blazers, leather shoes. anyone who went to school in the antipodes or most regions of the commonwealth will intrinsically know already why it's for the best.
    
    
32. i really am your biggest fan. for shizzle.
    
    

on the fingertips of drowned beatitude we'll see again

. Originally uploaded by snjezana.

when i walk sometimes, i hear piano melodies. single lines, one note at a time. i look around, frightened. i suppose sometimes god is so determined to tell us things, the wind passes and vibrates windows set in panes and the branches of trees and the sleeves of a shirt just in the right order, and some few notes, a temporary leitmotif, a clue about just that moment, just all-of-everything that exists for just one second to support us being us and me being me- the ground and everything beneath it, and me, and the sky and everything above, and me... that point in the hourglass where 10 million ghosts of every generation before me, and every pulse in a loin somewhere, or first-conversations that ended in laughter and love that led to... infinitude, and I, just I, balance the two eternities. The netherworlds of been, and will be. Two kingdoms, both strange and unpredictable, and invisible; ____and don't let them tell you otherwise- the past changes as frequently as the future, green eyes turn yellow, and fingertips are palm-trees, and moments laying in the sun turn into moments swimming in stars... silence grows silent wings and flies, and heavy burdensome despair grows two-red eyes and a butcher's beak and its aftertaste stings in new ways, all that. all that.

i am scared of life it is soo large. so unimaginable, so impossible- i'm here but i don't often believe it. and i fear it... and no one understands...; kicking rocks, spending my time comparing the protruding roots of too-large-trees, dreaming of love, and being in love and being sorry for love, and staring aimlessly away while my body runs on a treadmill from nowhere to nowhere, no one understands how many deserts worth of grains have to pass through me every decision, and the fate of every dead-(great)-grandfather anyone ever had has its natural conclusion in me. in one lifetime, the opportunity to put 10, 000 phantoms to rest peacefully, or to join their ranks, and watch, eyes-wide and whispering piano-melodies into the cold ears of mine (or some other's) grandson, to make one right to conclude history. to conclude a history of wrong, and mistake, and miscalculation, and to make the natural consequence of all my mistakes his virtue____ and my grandfather, sits on some other arm of this (or some other) milk-way, and stars aimlessly at stars he's finally close enough to determine the colors of, and sighs, and the sigh drifts (like a falling feather), and lives a whole life, and grows slowly old, and eventually dies into an autumn leaf, and eventually falls through a cloud, and disturbs some wind, and the wind shakes a tree the wrong way, and an apple falls precisely at the same time as a bird squeeks and a bicyclist falls off his bike up the road and says loud fuuu&^! and these sounds combine to play three notes in my ear, and i turn around and look, ...__... __... anyone there?
(and behind trees ghouls and saints and phantoms and the unpeacefully resting and the merry angels, all huddle and giggle, and my grandfather always too serious, and still too serious, shakes his head, sitting on equuleus alpha, and one ghoul, more long-suffering than the others, stares at my back tears in unvisible eyes, and hopes i win back what he lost.

do you see what i mean?
do you?

and in a dark place, besides a smooth, wet black rock the size of a bear, Sisyphus stops his task for a smoke, and stares up at the dark sky while his quadriceps shake from the last effort. He rubs the sweat from off his brow, exhales and comes to sit besides an olive tree, misjudging roots for black snakes he leaps back surprised. The snakes scurry away, hissing at him his reminder. __he picks up his cigarette, looks up into the black starless sky- the roof of a cave more like, and wonders if someone somewhere might with some word or deed, redeem some single of his kindred, and thus redeem them all. (us all he sighs). Dropping his cigarette, he steps behind the rock, now smooth, and tries to find two jagged spots to hold his hands into. His sweaty palms make this hard. With an grunt, he starts again. (the olive tree will be here too)

Dear God,

my failures You know. and that they have not ended You know. and that they cannot end You know. and of my mistakes You know. and of my prayers, which scratch at Your silence while in repose You try to imagine new futures for people who perhaps deserve it more than i, You know. of all these things You know. and of fatigue. and of hopeful(lessness). and bananas. and rolled-up jasmine leaves that open in my tea, with scent but without color, which make me happy. all these things that You drew into Your notebooks You know. (and me too, You know, in a notebook somewhere...

and dear god...
i don't know.

Best Regards, and wishing you a Happy Eternity
q

Fragments

i cannot be an entirely man when i listen to Ein deutsches Requiem, i do not know what comes over me, i really don't- it's a sudden lifting, as though my chair were levitating, and there's that feeling- the unbearable lightness of being, like the air in the balloon, that pushes on my skin and gives me shape, can finally seep back out, and drift off into the sky, and from my eyes i see the cloud inside me kind of leak out from my pores and drift off-
____-bye bye soul!
____-bye bye flesh!
and the two part amiably. neither one blaming the other for its nature- be it starbound or if it is to lie facing upwards in a dark box staring at nothing altogether much.

*__*__*

i was in a store today that sold only fairy paraphernalia. When my sister was younger than 10, she often insisted on going everywhere wearing her fairy wings. Mom thought it was ridiculous, i thought why hide the wings we know are there anyway?

i am determined that my unborn babies, when they find their way across three ethereal kingdoms, have their pre-life brief with a white bearded prophet under an olive-tree, get squished into a germinal cell and spend alot of time playing geometry exercises with their own body (EXERCISE: divide thyself in perfect halves approximately 18 billion times using only the intuitive sense of nature... and a protractor) spend nine-months tapping I AM TIRED OF BACH in Morse code on the inside of their mother's belly (while she and unborn.baby complain to me about yet another cantata), and finally come out too-red of their aquatic stale-mate, still more mermaid than man, crying and genetically predisposed to despise bright-white-lights (fluorescent or otherwise), will have several single-digit years to walk besides me with too-small steps i will never tire of watching her take, will hold my right hand with their left (holding a white wand with her right), wearing: tutu, tights, protruding belly, and compulsory wings, so that she will not forget her home before her home was the color of clouds, and had the smell of jasmine, and in heaven wherever you walk you hear the crunch of soft-white-rocks under your feet for reasons you won't know till you've endured being human once.

*__*__*

my project is almost finished. i usually make it a point to listen to whole works- an entire symphony, or whatever. but i am a little too excited this time i think. thus, i want to listen to:

____- Ravel, the slow movement of the piano concerto in G
____- Shostakovich, the percussion that closes the last movement of the last symphony (Robert brought my attention to this in December, and I've been dying to sit alone and hear it again)
____- Bach, Les plus belles Cantates (future-wife, if she reads this, shakes her head and mumbles dear god, it's already started, because she knows that's a 5-disc set)
____- Britten, Symphonia da requiem (the whole thing)
____- Rachmaninov, Prelude in G major, which to me sounds like the whole of spring put into 3 minutes- complete with ladybugs and the color green and a somewhat haloed sense of weightlessness

*__*__*

you need to master how you feel

and i don't know about that. it's true that i have a somewhat heightened sense of feeling. a somewhat excessive predilection towards sentiment. and that sometimes, after a movie, i can't quite move, or think or talk for a while. (I just watched Elephant, and its sheer aural and visual virtuosity... i didn't even notice the second half of the movie, i am still stunned by the opening) And Brahms can paralyze me, and love can fold me into a little oddly shaped ball and put me in its pocket, and snow can make me cry, and poems make my head turn, and concise mathematical proofs make me believe in God (and i feel on the inside the hairs of my bones stand straight).

and there's no doubt that there is an element of choice. i occasionally choose not to punch people in the face, even though i feel its probably warranted (and take my swollen pride home and plan in secret a tight-fitting lycra outfit, an appropriate super-hero name, and a nocturnal career as a crime-and-bad-manners fighting vigilante), so there's no reason why i can't choose various emotional responses. i think there might be a difference between attitude and emotion. Emotions i see a little too arbitrarily (i admit it's a faulty perspective)- almost like a scent in the wind, and sometimes, one is simply overcome by the sincerity of a spring day, and cannot contain a certain arctic thawing on the inside. other times, a tune or a small rattle-bag of words is enough to extinguish an entire afternoon. Word. faces. a woman who does/not smile at you. late trains, too many red lights, the scent of urine in stair-wells, too-wise graffiti on alleyway walls, the ever-kaleidoscope of life's mundane.sublime dramas... i can't control that. i can't even be too successful at managing my responses.

but attitude is different. attitude is a general 'ethos', a face that's pre-prepared to meet the faces that you meet (and Alex no doubt just jumped in her seat to see someone else also over-quote Prufrock)- and that can be controlled. The sad part of that is, attitude is too-much based on experience, on history... and that skews our preparation for the future, since we scientifically (erroneously) assume what has been previously true, will continue to be true in the future. There is no necessity for this consistency, and luck, good-will, faith, friendship, finance, desire, ambition, hope, can all dry up, or fly south for the winter and never come back.

i do not feel like writing out my 'ideas' presently.
i'll take this theme up again later.

*__*__*

I happen to be listening to A Sunday Smile, by Beirut, so I thought I'd end with the first of my: 

Poem-Variations on A Sunday Smile, a waltz, by Beirut


KEY:
____- words/phrases joined by . are interchangeable. Therefore, always still.soo can be read as either: always still, or, always soo.
____- words contained in parenthesis not to be read out-loud. They are secrets for the reader. Therefore, always still.soo (much) is to be read as either of the above alternatives.

____I.

____a sunday smile,
________ not too much to ask for,
________ but still wonderful to see,
____________ always.still.soo (much) wonderful (to see.to ask for),
________________ and fall from.towards.to… (soo
____________________________________much.)

________ and also:
____________ (much)

________________________ to forget.

STATUS: more writer's block

love is a thing i am scared of.
often, after i have failed at something, people's faces is another thing i am scared of.

*__*__*

hope i find is something that it takes many increments of time to build up- like a tree in your chest, it takes time.
defeat is instantaneous, and often, takes many increments of time to disintegrate- like a tree in your chest, it takes time.

*__*__*

look world, look!
(and she does, not sure yet what it is she sees)
(and i stop, not quite sure yet what to show her)

*__*__*

it seems we're all here in the same place.
(and she, on the phone, nods silently- but outloud says "my god, you're soo far away"

*__*__*

i am not a musician, though once, perhaps i was.
i am not a writer, though once, perhaps i might fall into being one.
i am not a man, since i imagine that's something that is very hard to be, at least women tell me so

*__*__*

[throws hands into the air in resignation, shakes his head]
(false alarm guys, still can't write)

STATUS: writer's block

i've tried everything:

____- sitting in dimly lit cafes for in excess of 3 hours

____- all the usual songs that inspire me

____- reading

____- the brutal memory of history

(and still the last 10 pages of my notebook have big fat crosses through them). Sure, there were some hopeful moments:

____- the truth is, home is a variable concept: sometimes person, sometimes object, and sometimes, as Martha put it: there's just no where to go home to.

____- And your eyes you say are greenest when you cry.

_____I walked along a beach once, found various rocks,

_______dipped them in the water and hoped to see 

_______you looking back at me. 

____- i wear cities like t-shirts

____- NOTAPOEM (HOMECOMINGOING PRAYER)

Familiar or not, I see gravestones with my name on them- to come or I'm already in I can't tell, I see shadows that dream their own dream and hum their own lullabies and I get scared if this town's a place I've already died in, or that's dead to me, or if we're dancing towards it now. 

____And her fingernails grow across the river, and I eat a meal without glancing at the menu for the first time in years: bowl of weeds, powdered minerals, and a glass of liquid- reflective as a mirror so I drink my head back into myself and see with double-vision till I urinate later. 

____And familiar heads smile at me and expect me to grow roots, and once gone always gone I say, and wait for my jet-lag (still a ghost of another time zone) to rescue me into a sleep I should already be in- sleeping on the floor in another gravitational field where up is still a half-unrealistic possibility amongst all the other non-possibilities. 

But the truth is... i've got nothing. 

We'll all just have to wait till it comes back. 

Until then... i have alot in me i can't seem to exhale. 

notapoem

untitled, James D. Kelly

and without fantasy, inklings of maybe-ness and
virtue spread thin enough to occasionally crack,
without that
______we might as well cut out our cardboard us-es
and paste name badges on them and throw them down stairs
and watch them smile still stupidly, while we, unDorian Grayed
get bored and walk on to perhaps think about how much cooler we'd have been
in high (after) school and afterwards too if we'd just taken to smoking earlier
in life, and there's nothing more ridiculous than a 25 year-old coughing up his last
can't-breathe-panic-attack while trying to rock hipster jeans and hipster hips and hipster face(s).

and without fantasy, the whole of nothing is totally possible, which is (obviously) as interesting as the whole of nothing totally sounds, which is to say: (and which i too often say so that now my sister when she rolls her eyes at my mom, copies me and mouths to me silently) shoot me now

and i gesture with a cocked-hand-pistol to my forehead, and recoil my head, and she smiles
and violence has never been so fun as lying here, at 5:55am waiting for the moon to fall asleep so i can steal her keys (that's a lie
i like to kiss her eye
it's satin and dry
as chalk, and she'll
only let me when she won't have to know
and after that, i'll go
(i promise,

that all the things i can't possibly know to be true (yet)
best be interesting,
because the things i do possibliest know to be true
have been.brought.given.and proven grave disappointingments.

____And while i don't wanna burn crosses into the irises of my eyes,
all atrocities are entirely possible
when a person's as this far away from themself,
or whoever they last were when they last lay on a bed
and didn't have to ask themself if it.that was home

and i don't dream,
and don't see steam streak straight up, sleight of story substitutes for starry sunrises still stay waiting to see.
____(which is to say: I am blind dear world,
____________[shakes his head]
____and there's no music for this tune,
____and if there's no music, there's no waltz.
____no walk ____no time ____no steps ____no dance

no more a point to join this long tangled line from then till now till later,
birth till oblivion,
(and all the oblivion in between)

*__*__*

i miss all you guys tonight.
i won't wake up in santa monica.
i won't have slept on the ground, with the shape of whatever i was reading imprinted on my belly cause i rolled over onto it at some point between midnight and 4am.
i won't not have breakfast.

and mostly...
i... [________]

sududQ: but and therefore or also is so since until

4, shesaskeleton

HONESTY TIME, THINGS I SHOULDN'T SAY OUTLOUD, A LIST

____- i tried to write the story. 4 times. different songs, different approaches. i cannot seem to embody myself... which is disturbing me. I cannot seem to be adequately myself in order to write it (it being everything) honestly. I have parts of it though. This is the first paragraph of approach number 4:

The first problem with this story is there's no where to start. I try and make an insightful, perceiving decision about just one point that beget the rest, one juncture or decision that was critical for all the others, and I cannot. There are moments of course, there are, but they are all off-shoots of other things. Can it be that there are not many stories, discrete and simplified, but that there is only one; and that that one is too long to be writtern, with too many characters for us to remember them all, and too many dull moments whose true significance can't ever be passed on to a reader?

____- i find it terrifying that, as i sat in the backseat and looked at familiar names and trees and words and cars on my way home from the airport, all i could think was: it is my only resolve that i should henceforth devote all my efforts to the simplest goal of all, to become so outstanding, so distinctly able at some thing that i should be able to leave this place, and never have to live here again.

____- i hate my life. __once upon a time, i had a beautiful passionate faculty for despair. a gorgeous ability to lay around languished, hopeless. i have lost that sense. And, also, have lost that particular (and currently very needed) quality of being resigned which i spent my first few months in LA working very hard to acquire. And just at that moment when it should have come to most use, i find in its stead: unsatisfied expectation. a sense of... standing on the wrong stage (this is the Taming of the Shrew, I'm looking for Coriolanus). I do not want this feeling, but cannot help feel that, this (and this means simply everything) is simply not what i want, and that, in all honesty, i am not a man who has discovered how to fashion what he wants.
____no doubt this is an adventure. (just not the one i wanted to have

____- another part of the unwritten story:

The 405 runs on in front me. My eyes have blured out of focus. I only notice shapes and the patterns of sunglare moving and the Morse code of red rear-lights. The air is warmer here. The sky yellow, which I can't understand. I move forward an inch, put my head out the window and breathe in. The lane besides me moves a few car lengths. I sit. All these people, going places. A white van stops besides me. I edge a little forward to look in. A Mexican man with a shaved head stares in straight ahead, unmoving. There is no music on, just the sound of an engine coughing him forward. His right hand he lifts from the steering wheel to scratch his nose. I look on, wait to see if he might cry. The car in front me me moves, I follow. I look at the hills surrounding me. My grandfather would take us hiking. He'd take his shirt off at the top. He'd sit on the white rocks and looks away. One time I took my shirt off too, but felt silly, and put it right back on. He laughed. I would see the shapes of dinosaurs hidden under the hills. I imagined one day a brontosaurus would rise from off her haunches and shake the shrubbery from off her skin. Other times I'd just walk, and stare away at nothing.
____A car beeps. I raise my hand, mouth _s o r r y_ in the rear view, drive forward 4 feet to the bumper of the car in front of me, and stop again. The guy behind me seems pleased. dickhead I mumble to myself.
____The caravan sneaks its way out from the valley, heading for the beach, or the cooler air, or all the things we still don't know we haven't left behind.

____- i don't know how to fix it.____ i don't know how to make it better.____ i'm scared.