i'm standing there watching the parade
feeling combination of sleepy john estes.
jayne mansfield. humphry bogart
mortimer snerd. murph the surf and so forth
erotic hitchhiker wearing japanese
blanket. gets my attention by asking didn't
he see me at this hootenanny down inpuerto vallarta, mexico
i say no you must be mistaken. i happen to be one of the Supremes
then he rips off his blanket an' suddenly becomes a middle-aged druggist.
up for district attorney. he starts screaming at me you're the one.
you're the one that's been causing all them riots over in vietnam.
immediately turns t' a bunch of people an' says if elected,
he'll have me electrocuted publicly on the next fourth of july.
i look around an' all these people he's talking to are carrying blowtorches
needless t' say, i split fast go back t' the nice quiet country.
am standing there writing WHAAT? on my favorite wall
when who should pass by in a jet plane but my recording engineer?
"i'm here t' pick up you and your lastest works of art.
do you need any help with anything?''
(pause)
my songs're written with the kettle drum in mind
a touch of any anxious color. unmentionable. obvious.
an' people perhaps like a soft brazilian singer . . .
i have given up at making any attempt at perfection
the fact that the white house is filled with leaders that've
never been t' the apollo theater amazes me.
why allen ginsberg was not chosen t' read poetry at the inauguration boggles my mind
if someone thinks norman mailer is more important than hank williams that's fine.
i have no arguments an' i never drink milk.
i would rather model harmonica holders than discuss aztec anthropology
english literature. or history of the unitednations.
i accept chaos. I am not sure whether it accepts me.
i know there're some people terrified of the bomb.
but there are other people terrified t' be seen carrying a modern screen magazine.
experience teaches that silence terrifies people the most . . .
i am convinced that all souls have some superior t' deal with
like the school system, an invisible circle of which no one can think
without consulting someone
in theface of this, responsibility, security, success mean absolutely nothing. . .
i would not want t' be bach. mozart. tolstoy. joe hill. gertrude stein or james dean
they are all dead.
the Great books've been written.
the Great sayings have all been said
I am about t' sketch You a picture of what goes on around here sometimes.
though I don't understand too well myself what's really happening.
i do know that we're all gonna die someday
an' that no death has ever stopped the world.
my poems are written in a rhythm of unpoetic distortion
divided by pierced ears. false eyelashes
subtracted by people constantly torturing each other.
with a melodic purring line of descriptive hollowness --
seen at times through dark sunglasses an' other forms of psychic explosion.
a song is anything that can walk by itself
i am called a songwriter. a poem is a naked person . . .
some people say that i am a poet
(end of pause)
an' so i answer my recording engineer
"yes. well i could use some help in getting this wall in the plane"
merry christmas from vintage jane and bob dylan
Ch. 3- Parlour Treasoné
My head is a long swirling chain of things I don`t dare to think about; apparently it gives me an irresistable charm. Donald told me that; he told me that he looks at me as even more bored or sophistocated than himself; he told me I make men long to find something, anything that will make me smile a real smile.
I hadn`t realized people could tell my smiles were false.
I suppose I don`t really care.
And today, half a summer into this trip, I added another thing to ignore to the chain of things to ignore. (And even thinking about the chain gives me words I don`t want to think of, some of them about queenship and a stone knife and mermaids slipping through free water). My headache, Donald`s headache, the unsuspicious or conniving farewell of Donald`s mother, and the sound of him moving about on the floor below me. My feet on the stairs despite the dull pulse in my head. The odd detachement of my body as I watched the morning light spill in the parlour window, the deathiness or paint chalk that connected between my hands and face, and Donald`s. Many would say I have done nothing wrong; not strictly.
But I am a traitor, and no one to go under the knife for me.
(Oh hell. Aslan, you said you`d send someone for me. If I fall further, it will be your fault.)
Ch.2-Under the Latent Heat of Dreams and the Ridiculous Pressure of Minds
At times, all you can think of is some ugly grey scribble across the plate glass of your sanity. At night, all you can dream of is the simultaneous existence of the colored craving things under the plate glass of your sanity. At night, in my corner room on the third floor, I can hardly sleep for dreaming.
Last I remember, I came here for something. For myself, I think, but I can't remember why. Last night, I could hardly sleep around this dream of my sister face-to-face with a lion I prefer to forget. He told her that I was on the verge of a fall (and the word was so pretty and dark-green that I only half-minded). She cried for me. He said he would send someone to me.
Donald, he is mine and I would half-prefer to fall. Sanity is like a little polite cough-- ineffectual, defeated. I can feel the broken lines in the glass, and all the colored craving things within stroke the surface of the glass and press a little harder against it. The escape is on the verge.
His claims are not so ineffectual as I like to pretend. I only half-mind; I only half-sleep.
Ch. 1: Something I Don't Want To Lose
--
The cream spills on the table, salted by her eyes, stirred in with breadcrumbs. I can half imagine it will come to life. If it came to life, it would be a cat, a pale, rough-tongued creature. It would weave around my shoulder and turn grey. Grow wings. Deform. Thrall me. My own loneliness burns a rough tongue along the raw flesh inside my chest. I am not sorry she is crying. I do not tell her I'll miss her. Can you count the tears I poured into the ocean like cream? Hell, but I'm lonely. The weight of responsibility, even the weight of sanity, has been dropped onto me.
The ocean liner contains me like a sardine or like tinned ham, and they say I've got a brilliant career ahead of me. A brilliant career like a firecracker into the silt and slag of life. I can hardly wait. I can hardly wait to be over these waters, not so tossed by thoughts that I can't sleep at night. Sometimes I'm not even sure they think I'm worth convincing anymore. I like to remember Narnia, when it was real. I like to wish. But they must not think I'm worth convincing anymore; they won't even talk to me about it. Hell, but I'm glad to be going. I didn't cry.
Or to come ashore in America and find Mrs. Walton waiting for me, effusive and stylish, and the way she calls me 'darling' and promises me the most lovely time I've ever imagined distracts or comforts me. Or the way you can almost see money dripping around her ankles and heels if you're not too busy being delighted and charming and sophisticated, and exchanging sparring glances with her son Donald. Which I am.
He enfolds me even more thoroughly than Mrs. Walton; I am sophisticated and I am delighted to be here, eluding Donald for amusement. Letting him fold me up under his chin while we dance, letting him whisper that he loves the smell of my hair, and then disappearing into some other man's arms before he can think past that. Letting him take me masterfully by the arm and walk with me under the green new leaves along the streets, buy me ices, pay me compliments, and spending the whole time being just faintly amused by something he can't put his finger on. Playing little games of tag in the sitting rooms and parlors where we spend our time: moving to the piano just after he catches me on a sofa, feeling a sudden need for conversation with someone across the room just as he's cornered me with someone else. Getting tired just when there's no other escape for me and leaving him to go to bed, and yet letting him kiss my hand when I come down for breakfast, and not taking my hand back until necessity requires it. Maybe he'll end up lonelier than I.
Kino-Eyes, part II
In the quietness of my room (where the air is red)
curtains slip apart and my eyes slip closed and (close-up shot of teeth biting their red lip)
I walk away. You can remember what you’ve done, but not why you’ve done it.
You can remember what you’ve done, but not why you’ve done it.
You can deny that, the little beads of oil on your skin that
you try to wash away with water. The pitted impure surface of your face.
Your adolescent body slips into the water.
There is a cool river. A green roil of love.
There are trees there; trees you’ve seen before when you were
a very young child. There are trees there that put you in mind
of your hand curling around the finger of your mother.
There is a current that looks like a solid thing, like you could
taste it, and it would be better than ribbon candy.
There is a long way to fall. You hang, Missionlike
on a long brown cross and over over ice
over ice on the rocks into the blue roar of movement
music like a dying experiment into your thrashing soul.
There is white water there is a pounding sound, the spray
and the mist and your own young changing body bound up in that.
There is a smell of chemicals.
There is a soft blue cloud, something you forgot.
The suspension of the silk-soft bodies in aerial liquid,
the dance of portions of races in gold and rose sweepings
against a blue, blue sky. There is an eye as deep as space and time,
but pale, pale and open. There is no atmosphere that hides you from that eye.
There is the English-garden drift of snowflakes over the little brown leavings of flowers, over the light of the garden lamppost, onto the waxen white surface of the snow. There are her fingers, the way they lilt over the ivory keys of the piano, the soft singing of her. The way you look up, the warmth of that living room, the movement of your nerves, stumbling tongue.
There is a smell of chemicals.
And you walk back, back over the great walls of the city, into the velvet-trimmed red-scarf dance of the city girls, into the avalanching noise of the city men, into the hands of the city fathers, painted and painted by the city children and you,
you are, you are getting late, tired,
and you, your fists are no salvation
no salvation
no salvation at all.
Purpled against the night sky, her arms are bruised now, her white wrists with the marks of your thumbs, the aural defects of her body are too new for you. You can’t quite understand where she came from, where she was going. You thought you knew her, and then again, perhaps not. And you thought you knew her. But then again, perhaps not. And so it goes again. Purpled against against against the night sky she is not like a banner, too bruised on her white arms, but she is like a banner and she is dancing against the dusk like wine.
And you portray yourself, the red and burnt-gold squares of paint, the daubs, the brushstrokes, the model, the painter. There are things you know of yourself, and those things you paint in, but what of your questions? What of the things you wonder to yourself and never speak of? What of the little codes, the half-shadowed inclusions that you never confess to yourself? And you delineate, and you deny, and you debate, fracture,
dissipate into countless pieces on some floor of marble tile. And that is too hard, too chemical. You wrap yourself into a pale fog, you wrap yourself in the aural liquid of music and acousiomatic, until no one recognizes you.
And no one recognizes you.
Playing Detective
"Well..." said Emily, politely, brightly (she was a good girl, that she was), "she doesn't know you."
"I have the ring," said the motorcycle boy, pulling it out of his pocket for good measure. I went a little less blank this time; I didn't feel I had any right to be surprised at anything he did. He did have the ring. A pretty little white gold and diamond affair. It seemed like it wanted to leave his fingers; they were too blunt and strong for it. Emily, senior, stared in amazement.
"She doesn't know you," she repeated. Her face was pretty and amusing, caught up like that. "She's never seen you before."
"Well, then, will you marry me?" he said. Emily, senior, made no attempt at a graceful exit. She opened her mouth, closed it, opened it, and basely fled. The coffee on the table was finished steaming.
"No," he said. "Probably not. Now I think about it." He picked up the ring and spun it between his fingers. "Probably not. But I thought it was worthy a try."
"No harm in trying," I said. He nodded in agreement. Flickered his steady dark eyes (I decided they were not as level as his face, but more encouraging) around the room. Found mine again.
"Well, then," he began.
"Wait a moment," I said. I reached down, pulled off my shoes, and tossed them haphazardly into the trashcan by the door. "Sorry," I said (Deeply. Never a more heartfelt sorry). "Do go on."
He smiled approvingly.
"Well, then. Will you marry me?"
I nodded. Not enthusiastically, not amusedly, but knowingly. He didn't run for another table. He held out his hand. I gave him mine. He slid the ring onto my finger. I noted with pleasure the Emilys standing in a rabbitlike clump at the end of the counter, staring. My PhD boy abandoned ship. I'm not sure he even paid his bill.
“I came for you, really,” he said as he tossed me the extra helmet. A length of white veil tumbled out of it onto my lap. “-Hold onto that- I followed you here. I was playing detective, and I thought perhaps it was you I was looking for.”
Who Are You Singing For?
listening to 'milk alloy' at 2100 hours
I mean, you can look back.
You thought you knew what was going on, but you found out you really didn't. Everything around you is charged with some officious reason, but can you shake the feeling that the officious is the least momentous? Somehow, you wonder if maybe it's just a little too late to fix all the problems around you by wearing the uniform you shoved into the back of the cupboard.
You know, you can look back.
The room is plain, wooden, studded with bare nails. The bed is small, sagging, tarnished brass-paint, discolored white comforter. The mirror is spotted, warped. No curtains hang in the window, and it's not a pretty view. The town is as bare as the room.
But still, you can look back.
Sometimes, at night, you hum to yourself. 'milk alloy' at 2100 hours. It's not a soothing song, the metallic mistaste, but maybe it quenches your thirst. Sometimes, in the morning, the sun is like honey stained on the floor. It's not a satisfying thing, that moving sun, but it reminds you of eden behind, paradise before.
And yeah, you can look back.
That night you were born, the mud-black hole, the body waste and the labor pains, was a quiet dead first note. But you're in the second movement now, and it's all crescendo on from here. Your feet, they walk on trash-filled ground, deep sucking mud, and sometimes far from the right way, but yeah, it's all crescendo from here.
And you, you can look back.
All the opening notes were like white soap. All the closing notes will be like golden rain, milk alloyed with honey. And in between the click of the light and the start of the dream, some will taste like milk alloyed with brass, and some will feel like honey stirred with trash. But you don't have to put on that uniform. You don't have to get too tired and fall asleep in the mud. But you don't have to feel the imprint of bare nails in your cheek; but you can feel the imprint of bare nails. And if the music is like blues, sobs of distorted guitar sometimes, you don't have to forget that it's all crescendo going up, even if the movement's not all joyous.
But still- you, you can look back.
rocking the 5-7-5
am in love with haikus today. never wrote them before now.
--
exercise#chinatown
she had even more
character than the red wooden
sign hung overhead
in the lab I think
in green, forgetful of your
multipurpose blade.
I like to pretend
that your wildly flashing pen
does not inspire me.
when you look my way
my body turns African;
I think in rhythms.
you could tell by how
he watched her mouth moving-
he thought it a waltz.
I never thought blood
from my lips could fall down so
like tomato juice.
search a bit harder;
I know you'll find cane sugar
hidden in the trash.
humanitarian ghost sedan
you think I'm paying you off?
see, every afternoon, every weeknight, is the last one, for me. It's the way I keep sane, pretending that I'm about to see the end. Pretending that this afternoon, this weeknight, is the one where I'll go quietly, like a needle over vinyl, up the stairs to my room. There will be a couple thousand dollars that I can slip into a knapsack, some sweaters, notebooks. The make up I never go anywhere without. Markers, scissors and maybe a copy of Walden to steel me or a copy of The Little Prince to remind me what the grown ups do. And I'll blow a kiss to my vinyl and my drums and my books and the bed I've been saving, saw through the chains of my anchors. And I'll write a note to my family- something kind but final. And that afternoon or that weeknight, I'll start walking.
Eventually, I'll hit the city. I'll be tired, terrified. My body will be inscribed on every grimy wall I pass. Alone. Alone. Alone. It will thud against my skull, ache in my ribs. That will be my baptism. The kind of alone no one keeps walking through will wash it's city-trash over me and there will be some new life somewhere in it.
After a terrifying few days (I'll hide in libraries and coffee shops where it's tame, but the savagery will still be working it's root into me) I'll get on a bus or a train and go to somewhere else. Maybe Chicago, maybe Alabama. It doesn't matter, really, only I'll think about what I feel like before I go. Maybe Alabama, maybe San Diego. Maybe Amish country. It doesn't matter, really, as long as it's a place that isn't here.
I'll walk and learn to breath after my baptism, like a toddler in photographs, gradual jerking motion. I'll find a place to live, unusual and maybe sunny. I'll learn to talk to strangers just like I was always taught not to. I'll make friends, but only on random meetings of eyes, not on introductions. A year will pass. Maybe two. It doesn't matter, really.
I'll get on a plane. I won't have any money to my name after I get on that plane, but I won't be needing return fare. I'll get to Europe, maybe Africa. It doesn't matter, really, as long as the sun breaks out of a cloud when I get there and my jeans are worn in with a few months worth of soft dirt. I'll be on some mountains then, coming home out of my home after so long. I'll go to a city, maybe, but sometimes not a city. It doesn't matter, really, as long as I work harder than I ever wanted to back home, and give my money away or find out how not to keep it. After a few months, there will be a boy, too. His jeans will be worn in soft with unwashing, and he'll move like vinyl around me.
I'll have a child. I'll visit my home. I'll spin like vinyl around my boy, maybe my boys. Maybe I'll have two children or three or four. Maybe one will be a girl. I'll be getting old. Looking like I was born yesterday. Maybe my belly will be swelling with another child. The blankets on my bed- my bed and my boy's bed- will have squares of sunlight on them, and sometimes we'll lie down together in the sunlight and he'll rub his fingers over the wrinkles coming on my face. Maybe we'll die like that, together, when our children bring their children to play on the floor of my small house.
You think I'm honestly here?
This is no half-dream. I've planned it all.
Maybe this afternoon, this weeknight, will be the one where I go quietly, like a needle over vinyl, like a flame finding a wick.
william orbit mix
U2-One
--
after the dance
some uninscribed body devises an image on the floor.
after the dance
some inhibited eye tumbles closed too slowly
after the dance your
ownership is more denied and confirmed than my tongue can follow,
ink blue circles devised along my shoulder blade,
indigo symbolism inscribed on the curve of my waist
dark color stained on my iris.
tired. The dark quiet alcohol
hung around my neck and my hands
cupped around the neck of every man there
at some brief course of the minute hand.
The marble floor is my mother, holding me like
a cold, white, flat womb. Your hand is a journey
inscribed over the iridescent purple painted on my
shins, the inversion defiance of the dry salty white
of sweat on my temples.
I am.
we cannot recollect the strewn pieces of our
inky selves and assemble them like a hypodermic
electric decision around our stormy imperfection of
motion. and
after the dance
we let pass an hour on the floor-
waiting for our bodies to forgive us.
unabstained. The brush of spread hands
streaked the taste of blue-purple across my
forearms onto your forehead. The pulse of
lost time
rearranges my perceptions
and sometimes I ask forgiveness of my body
for the open walls of my ribcage,
for the urgent lift of my lungs in the ribbons of
dark air.
Kino-Eyes, part I
Canto IV
She put her head to one side.
It was glossy like a black car in the sun;
her movements were clear-spun languid,
the color of the skin on her wrists.
She had a smile hiding somewhere on her lips,
the slope of her feet, the outline of her ankles,
the little symbols of life and girlhood and convictions
hanging, dangling, vibrating on her wrists and arms.
Canto X
That you feel at all-- that is
the greatest sanity and the wildest insanity.
Sterility, steel, bodies tangled up in heaps
after the machines of war have passed by,
and your heart goes on beating,
your heart goes on beating like
an untuned drum.
Canto IV
They asked her to pray when
she was on the verge of tears. She
betrayed herself, but not sorry. She held out
her wrists for handcuffs. She slid her hand up into her
black hair, felt her rough scalp, the hiddenness of
that, and her heart, and hummed to herself,
some old songs about nails and stones and love
and a new one about a bare scalp and bandages.
Canto X
You get scarred, you get scarred
on your body where your shoulder becomes
your back, where your cheek becomes your forehead,
where your jawbone slips back into your skull. You get
scarred, the way knives slip into bodies that have been
pressed resisting against the wall.
sorts&designations:
exerpt,
metaphor,
mood,
prosetry,
self-portrait tuesday,
series,
surrealism
2
xc,
the apollo program was a hoax
http://iplaybass.flyingstove.com/Music/Refused/The%20Shape%20Of%20Punk%20To%20Come/12%20The%20Apollo%20Programme%20Was%20A%20Hoax.mp3
open this link in a new window...
--
You wake up; for him it's like the end of the world.
It's like we've never been sleeping.
I mean, I can just barely hear you, the way your boots take you up the stairs, the way your voice buzzes against your throat, the way you laugh when you're not amused, like a little gold knife. I can barely hear you but my head roars.
My headphones roar in my ears, the room is full of red-gold light. It suffuses skin, obscures eyes, closes the spaces around us into a small warm circle. My fingers trail through the shadows, the music, the melody that dances lightly over the darker-eyed bass line. And I can hardly hear you.
The way we converse, like a cough. Did I tell you about the red-gold destruction of our city? The war that drummed through it? Our house spilled out on the streets. Your house turned into a crystal museum, broken glass. Did I tell you what the soldiers did to my sister? Or about the indoctrination of your brother?
My head roars in the silent light. Your head is pinpricks of dark hair like sandpaper that your father wouldn't understand. My father wouldn't understand me either, western ways. The boy I am with who is not of our faith. You, with your inked skin. Your mother would say to mine, "Ai, our children, we don't know them anymore.". My mother would say to yours, "They are lost to us; my girl and your boy who used to play so nice in the backyard.".
They do not understand us. My mother would look at me disappointed; "Nice girls don't smoke." You father would wonder why you aren't married yet. Our mothers would not understand how we see each other every day and are not in love. They want grandchildren. They wouldn't understand how we dance. The silver studding my ear. The slope of my shoes. The grommets in your jacket, the letters on your arm. The mock prison number on your close-cut head.
I can't hear you through the way we talk, like spilled bitter beer. Red destruction, gold. The war of western drums against our parents. We can't understand them, either, we who left before war broke our window and splintered our walls. I wonder about what the soldiers did to my sister; if it changed her too badly. If the indoctrination made your brother a stranger to your parents.
Part XXIV- Jane Comes Back
The whole night was a mistake, the unprofound reunion at 3 A.M., Jane's burgundy dress, the semi-invisible rains that fell. The bar of distance, six inches of wrought iron space between Xenos's arm and Jane's. Jane held onto her left arm with her right hand so that it didn't try to find Xenos's hand. The rusty dark fall-and-night forest they wandered through was like glazed pottery, a dark red bowl or a heavy jar that held their soft laughs and intermediate thoughts. Sounds of music drifted back from the Festival Stage.
They wandered around until morning, talking quietly like it was the nineties again and they were the color of tapes and old yellow brick, They meant to go inside, but they somehow ended up by the pool; Jane sat down on the ledge of the flowerbed and Xenos leaned against it. Jane looked down at his dark hair and thought about sleeping against it. Xenos listened to Jane breathe. The guitar on Jane’s lap was like a brittle, pretty wall between them, a wall just waiting to be snapped down.
Mist drifted off the pool in lazy eddies, and the little light hairs on Jane’s arms stood up like they were reaching for Xenos. She strummed idly on the guitar. Lyrical, spiritual, spilling out words. She wanted his arms to chase away the cold of her body.
My limbs… she thought to herself. Strummed her guitar. My limbs are not my body.
Yeah, my limbs are not body,
My head is not my bones.
My blood just washes over me,
spills all around my lungs.
I'm my mistranslated eyes
Dark symbols that you misread
while, pressed up against this windowpane
I couldn't hear a word you said.
The melody formed quickly in her head, assembled itself neatly around the cold half-light, and Jane smiled.
Long ago, I knew my name,
I’m glad you sent that fact away
September comes, we’re cold and wet
Drunk like milk and so pleased to forget.
My words evoke no dignity,
My brain and name depart
Your chocolate mouth evokes my words,
Your soft disunion evokes art.
My breath is not recovered
My hair has not got dry
My limbs are not my body, baby
This is not goodbye.
Long ago, I had a place but now
I’m lost and I intend to stay
Dark like water I awake
My limbs have no recall and no namesake.
Jane’s fingers evoked music, few simple notes to supplement the full melody turning and turning in her head. She hummed quietly, and Xenos lay down on the cold cement at Jane’s feet, looking up at her, happy.
“Sing it for me?” said Xenos. Jane smiled again. She was very pleased to see his eyes, very glad that he had asked.
Her body was cold without Xenos touching her, but her soul was very warm.
--
for danielle. in honor of comments finally working.
dryad's recall
J<&>W
My own hands pressed against the revolving door, but my nerves were cuddled deep inside my palms, and I felt nothing but a faint surprise that someone was turning the door.
I am a lover of certainty, and I could not be sure of anything.
Rain has always walked the most curtained moments of my life- rain and no umbrella. My hair stood out in little curls furred over with mist from the almost-invisible drizzle. I bit my lip around the details, and thought reasonlessly about my shoes on the polished floor and my hands hiding away from me and my hair carrying in the mist and my eyes and what they might see.
10 A.M. The clock was like a person overdressed on the wall, giving out uselessness with the ceremony of life-and-death. I blew it a kiss with my scattered mind, and advance on the lobby. The wind does not blow in here; it is humid like me.
I have little halls in my body, unopened windows, old secrets. 10:10 A.M. and no one is here to open up my chest.
I half suspected this. My hands are little huddled people around my neck.
--
10:15 A.M. He is here. He looks different than before. His hair does not move so much.
War kissed his body back maybe to something like it was before. Real war. My hair curls into my eyes, but I was long ago ripped off my interest in scarlet sashes, so I let it fall.
I wonder if he will speak. I wonder if we still know how to speak.
He puts his fingers against his fingers; he never used to do that. I tilt my head at him. My lips bite out details: a scar on his wrist, a scar in his eye, the rain falling harder against the gilt-framed window. My own hand tightening on the arm of the chair, the carving pressing into the pale skin of my wrist. My wrist are not so young as they were. The skin slips around in wrinkles when my eyes are tired from a long day. I sometimes walk around a ruined white pyramid.
"Hello," he says. No name for me, not since names began to mean something more than a word inverted on itself and cut away into nothing. His voice talks out of his mouth like he has stitches in his lungs, but I am not sorry, because before, it talked out of foreign lungs that I had in my own chest.
"Hello," I say. No name for him, because his old name is hard and twisted like scar tissue from 1984. I am sick to death of scar tissue. I stand up. I am not young, but my body aged well and my hair is pretty with mist; I wore the dress I knew he would like. I stand up, and it is like the untying of a scarlet sash.
Pockets Full Of Coffee Beans (And Other Reasons To Read Something Else)
Under the cliffhanging cover of a ledge of roof, the girl in the slate-grey sweater glanced down at her feet. Held one foot up in the orangeish glow of the shop-lights. Her shoes were terribly interesting and impractical; she was up to her ankles in cold water. Water sluiced down the drainpipes and spilled over the edges of the eavestroughs, spattering against the ground uncolored paint. The streets were streaked with reflected light, the cars flashed by like fish.
She was late; motions of her wrist and eyes and lips speculated about getting wet and precluded the possibility of the rain ending. Sound and blackness splashed out onto the street, and she looked back and forth, pushing back damp strands of her hair.
She was twenty-four. Born May 16, 1983. She was a walker; she looked over her shoulder at you and was gone. She had learned without watching about langour and slanted looks, the motions of eyes and wrists and lips. She was a taker, but whenever her thoughts remembered themselves, she tried to give. No one knew her middle name.
She looked after an umbrella-ed man, agonized, made a wish, and blew out her candles. Her shoes shone with water as she ran lightly across the street and disappeared into the people of the city. She was a walker; she looked over her shoulder at you and was gone before you could ask about her name.
New-Wave Part I: Life
Sometimes you can taste songs echoing in your head, the kind of music that makes you walk differently, fills your eyes up with new-wave colors and animates your hands like sheet music.
Like life is something that gets put into you in doses. You could be my pharmacist.
June 24th is a good day, one you might remember if you lived in it. Some things are like revolving doors always coming back to the axis, sliding doors always meeting again in the middle, swinging doors always turning on one point.
Like life is something lived for and after some date. You could be my June 24th.
Watercolor paintings make pretty splashes of green, blue, pink, yellow, red as they dissolve on rainy pavement. They take the meaning of their whole and break into pieces of color, pulp and beauty on the hard ground.
Like life is something that takes it's color and substance from diffraction. You could be the one who destroyed into me color.
Like Life is a friend who walks beside you, pointing to colors and humming you songs, laughing in the rain that clings to your eyelashes, glass beads that left the papers in soft pieces.
My God In A Windowpane
The rain is distorting the enclosure of the blue-grey world into circles of wideness. It is too dark to see, but not dark enough for lights, and so the small clouded world is giving me recognitions, erstwhiles, perhapses, to pass the time. There are no shadows, or it is all shadows. The sidewalk is a slate of water. The street is a river. Wrought iron gleams with black-wetness.
I find my God in a windowpane.
Rasheed is walking into Mecca and he can hardly breath. Dusky cheeks burned, eyes open wider than he knew they opened. The dust is a kiss, and he is part of something more beautiful than he dared dream, more beautiful than he knew he could endure. He is a simple soul, and he is coughing and breathing with beautiful things for his prophet. His imagination fails him, and he walks half-uncomphrehending through the swirl of sweating, glorying pilgrims. The dust is a kiss on his dark lips. There is intricate stone and waiting bodies and everyone feeding each other, feeding each other, calling out.
I find my God in a window.
The web is like grey death, decay. Head down hangs the spider, rocking with the wind, waiting for flying things to feed on. Wolfish litters of leftover pieces, but the frost is coming; the spider can feel death crawling up on it. Death has fangs like a black widow, many legs and many ways of approaching. Morning will see the spider withered into a curled-leg ball amid the ice-laced grass, and the web will break free into useless strands. In the next life, the spider will be a beautiful grey star-thing, stroking it's pointed legs against the sky. The spider will die and the spider will crawl away.
I find my God in a windowpane.
28.07.07
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cold cold beautiful water and the glassdrops from the
blades of grass trickle onto you?
--
those eyes, swept around with cat-brown liner-
too young for what they bear? well, they're old enough,
old enough for dragon-taming and looking back to Egypt.
the neat cool rows of metal-and-glass that we enter and
animate. see life, see life walking up and down the keysof
the green accordion, resting on bundled herbs and bakery bread.
those hands, comforting and grey-brown holding up
small empires and letting fall pretty gestures, describing,
circumscribing. persistant and the snap of a camera like
teeth closing around a captured image. that's not my face
you just sunk your teeth into, camera, but I can look it
in the eye and see laughter in it, anyways. see life crawling
with ants in the grass- will we pull our legs away, brush it
aside? you remember opression and harmony and life sits
contentedly on the stairs as we talk in the sun.
that head, gleaming like wood against my jawbone,
that head (that head I half-hold inside my own) circles like an eye.
we are very brave and
we are very glad.
--
look you, look you, look well the oddessy,
look well we are not who they decided we would be.
look you, I am not a surrendered vase, you are not
a thoughtless beauty. yours is not a thoughtless beauty.
I have not mustered so little passion as that, to wake up
and look 'round and recall music and cinema in my beating
soul like a bracelet on the ankle of a walking girl,
like beads of water on the tired ankles of walking girls.
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The Mad Days
Guitar strings broke, spiraled up and needled into eyes. The wild chorus of feedback fed like lightning into our ears. Vibrations shook the room, the empty bleachers, the stage. Monitors skittered across the wood. Lightbulbs shattered, sparked above us, a premature light show, and cords wound black smooth sides around our feet as we hung breathlessly onto the curtains that hung on with half their rings. The stage spilt into two jagged islands and we slid toward the center, tangled in the curtains that we had hoped to be held up by. Amps, guitars, drums, went sliding towards the rift, bruising us as they ran by. We caught our hands in a groove of wood and hung there as the world slid everywhere. Then, the lights went and the sound died into nothing. Shakily we crawled out of the wreckage and into the stairwell. All was quiet, but nothing was still.
All was changed.
So began the mad days.
Alone, with no audience, with no stage, with no instruments, we dragged ourselves up to the fire escape. Our splintered hands left blood marks on the walls, our bruises swelled and grew like mushroom clouds, purpling our skin like fruit. Broken water pipelines dripped echoing dark water down in the blacked-out halls, forming pools on the cracked linoleum. The silence from the city so quickly broken breathed on our necks, crackling down our spines.
All was fallen, but he was coming.
lorem ipsum inquisitat
Have you noticed the ground, so steady and callous beneath your feet?
And have you bothered to be thankful for it?
Did you listen as the green blades like little knives exchanged parries and ripostes?
And did you translate it into your own tongue?
Do you believe in love at first sight, the power of God, or forests at night?
And have you bothered to step onto the swaying bridge of action (around which hangs the strange air of faith; under which runs the unkind river of failure)?
Was there something you wanted to say? (or am I misreading that semi-illegible scrawl of your eyes?)
And did you think of opening your mouth before your eyes?
Aren't you forgetting your first love when you walk so carelessly on the holy grounds?
And have you bothered to retrace your steps into a well-watered curtain of repentance?
And have you bothered to desire a change, a flight of birds, a renewed reason?
Weren't you achingly glad of rest when you first found it?
And are you going to go on forgetting what it's worth as you hold it casually by the throat?
Weren't you achingly glad to rest when you first were laid down?
What less could you do before the face of justice, falling into lines of open-armed pleasure as you walk in in gladness of rest?
And have you bothered to remember there was nothing less? (have you bothered to fall with laughter into open arms that ask nothing of you?)
Can you ask nothing more of the broad-shouldered days of summer than brown skin and a piece of laughter?
And do you mean to ignore me, so peacefully disabled, so tortuously controlled, until fall stumbles onto us?
Do you recall where you meant to go, before the path grew over around you?
And have you bothered to lie on the ground, listening for something to guide you?
And have you bothered to listen for the echoes of guiding feet, pounding feet, righteous feet?
What if the ground sways? (what if it sways when he walks by?)
Will that ingratiate uncomprehension, grinning, disappearing slowly, to your unconsciousness?
What if the last remaining route is over a chasm like losing yourself to an enemy?
And have you bothered to lace your 14i black boots? (have you bothered to wonder what good they'll do you?)
Will you hear me repeat one last liturgy between gentle coughs?
And will you think to rearrange your face into a half-smile over the saintly words and called-up memories?
Will you let me try one last experiment over your tattered, stubborn body? (will you neglect to remind me that no experiments are necessary?)
And have you bothered to challenge me on this, to pull at my scalpel with the insistence of a hungry child?
And have you bothered to open your eyes in my direction so I can see them as hungry as they are?
What if the ground sways? (what if it sways when he walks by?)
Will that move you to move with it?
the velocity of souls in green fields of water under the hands of barren iron people
eyes on the sky between
Mars and Saturn,
eyes on the ground,
.....black dirt,
.........grey stone,
rice paddy
..rice paddy
....rice paddy
baby, you're going home.
fingertips, razors of grass, broadeaf
hands up, waiting on:
..time
....time
......time..
time doesn't leave you alone.
high on the ramparts of guardrails
............ (and views)
under the arches of skies and your muse
money
..cigars
....chalk
......and dreams
rice paddy;
baby, come home.
vigilante girl remembers summer 1998
here comes the vigilante summer, 1998-
Tennyson, You Forget That I Have Never Slept
The brown-bent figure in the shabby suit
hunched over the organ (like it would save his soul)
stretched his fingers habitually,
cramming the weary morning with coffee and the
honey-colored sun that dyes the pews.
-
The organ is sighing through it's huge lungs,
remembering the way eight fine souls were
buried in soft wet earth. Organist is disheveled,
autistic, but right. He knows what to say
when she says goodbye. He's no Tennyson,
but he has sleepless nights around an old
brown radio, dreaming of static and a thin
white arm. He leans on his knees, worn shoes
forward like the cover of his story. He never
learned today's words, and he still calls girls
'my dear' and takes his hat off when he speaks
to fathers. Twists it in his hands. Finds solace
in the colossus of the pipe organ, lending its
voice to the weary dusty people, its shine to
the silent aching people. Lending him its power
and he is not frail today. Organist, don't turn.
--
Make certain you know what you're getting
into before you open a book of hymns. There
are other reasons to sing than because your
soul needs washing. Things like organs echo
and don't turn away from the organist. The
water falls on your shoulders in your soul.
--
In chanting script, they write his obituary,
but all he ever read was note of music. He
had nothing to say to you. You have nothing
you know of him. You don't believe you can
understand why they try to play organ music
at his funeral, when all he ever did was murmur
broken words and rock in his seat when some
interloper was given his place at the organ.
--
Tennyson, you forget that I was saving myself
for the organist and his piano fingers. You don't
have one thing to give me with your reasoning
structure of beauty. You forget that I understood
his insomnia, broken phrases, his need for a better,
larger set of lungs to speak his mind. Organs and words.
Tennyson, you forget that I have never slept
Molasses Cookies and the Third Time the Rooster Crows
instrumental conversations, pt. II
Flat black eyes looked up from over Ian’s hollow-body. Six weeks had passed since the Transverse Music Festival, and Ian had gotten as slow and dark as molasses. I sat down on the bar stool, tracing the white carvings in the black wood with my finger. The stool rocked on its spindly legs.
Ian looked at me from over his hollow-body. A shield. I shrugged. Ian had called me here, and Ian would start the conversation.
The clock- made out of a tire, with oversized hands- ticked heavily. The curtains were closed. I got up and opened them. I went and sat back down, and Ian got up and closed them again.
There was nothing really to do. Ian started playing the song- The Chameleon Glare of Turning Hearts- from the Transverse show, and I got up and started making cookies.
I knew my recipe as well as Ian knew his song, and for ten minutes, our recall went on in perfect rhythm. I cracked an egg into my green mixing bowl while Ian experimented with the first bridge. I measured out molasses while Ian’s molasses eyes followed his fingers up the fretboard. I made little mounds of batter while Ian hummed along with the ending. I set the oven as the last notes rang out, and then I turned around and I could tell Ian was ready to talk.
“It’s been six weeks,” he said slowly. I looked down at my hands. I knew that already, Ian.
“So what do I do?”
“You’re asking me?” I was more surprised than angry, for now, but I could tell that I would be more angry than surprised before this was over. I brushed aside the flour on the counter and sat down.
“I guess not,” sighed Ian. “I wrote a new song. It’s called Peter Grieves. Can I play it for you?”
I knew before he started playing what it was going to say. That was how things were with Ian and me. I thought he was acting like molasses, so I made molasses cookies, pretending they weren’t carrying a message. Ian played the song, pretending it wasn’t talking to me, to give me the message he didn’t dare to speak.
Walks on the water of sparrows and thieves,
Gives up the standard, denies and grieves,
Flies you in through a slate-blue door
Falters and fades and falls cold on the floor.
I don’t think you’re reading the story the way it’s written
These battles and flights of birds are the resurrection..
Peter grieves and Jesus dies
A slave girl blinks her peacock eyes
“Hey, aren’t you one of Jesus’ guys?”
Well, mockingbirds’ mouths are built for lies.
Harsh as birth the rooster sings
Down falls the hawk with broken wings
The owl is sleeping when the wolf-dog springs
You’ve got me, I’ve got nothing.
Down in the streets there are fish and men,
Broken bread and fox’s den
Peter wakes up to a blackbird’s claws,
Over blood-rust cities a black crow caws.
Peter grieves and Jesus dies
Feathers fall down in covered eyes
Rips them open, ignores their cries
a raucous chorus of vows and tries.
I can tell you what daylight brings:
A cold dead air like diamond rings.
Peter fails that to which he clings
And you’ve got me, I’ve got nothing.
Asks without faith and gets quail like hell
Rises like a heron for show and tell
Lives and dies in a phoenix flame
With an upside-down cross to remember his name.
Peter grieves and Jesus dies
Money turns ash by the souls he buys
A new stream bursts and an old one dries
And a crippled pelican finally flies.
Dead birds don’t own fears or kings,
It’s the lives ones that the serpent stings
Peter grieves but Jesus lives,
and we’re red eagles on what he gives.
Ian finished on a D minor, hovered over it to let me get the full effect, and finally lowered his guitar. We watched each other for a while. Then I sighed my surrender.
“Okay, Ian,” I said. “This time you win.”
Ian got up, took off the brown cardigan I had been wondering about. It was too hot in Ian’s apartment for cardigans. Beat me to the oven when the buzzer went.
“Peter grieves...” I said musingly, and Ian made a sort of imaginary movement towards his shield of a guitar. The score still stood pretty even between us, after all.
Uilleann Girl
“Look,” she said, pointing with a strangely childlike arm. “It’s laughing at you.”
He turned. The sun was hanging woundedly in the air, wavering and smudged like tears or watercolor. It did, indeed, look like a smiling mouth, and the red-tinted cloud above it like two eyes.
The sun set quickly, to the tune of the uilleann pipes that he played when she wasn’t paying attention. Her fiddle was waiting for her in its careless case, but she just sat on the stone wall over the sharp drop of rocks and green grass, watching where the rim of the sun still shone like a lip of neon blood.
“You know why, don’t you?” she said suddenly, when the sun had surrendered to the turn of the earth. He thought she looked distractingly like she was going to fall, balancing with her arms outstretched on the uneven stones.
“Be careful,” he said, going over to her. He had to be ready to catch her. “Why what?”
“Why the sun is laughing at you.” She danced away from him, teetering and twirling precariously. He leaned over the edge- heights scared him; he stayed away from the edge whenever he could, loving the view of the fields but hating the steep cruel half-cliff that let him see it- to remind himself that she must not fall.
“Why?” he asked, when it began to seem as if she wouldn’t explain.
She came over to him as unreasonably as she had gone.
“You think your pipes are a substitute for a voice.” She whirled around again; the ragged, uneven edges of her soft brown dress struck his arms as he reached out involuntarily to catch her.
“You think I will fall,” she added, jumping lightly down from the wall. She was barefoot. Perhaps that was why she could balance so easily. He looked at his stiff black shoes, and followed her.
Still careless, she took her fiddle; tuned it.
“You know?” she said. She always strung out conversations as long as it took for him to join, but he always took as long as he could. He nodded and joined her song. He didn’t have to look at her to see the familiar jerk and rock of her body as she moved with the music, but he watched anyways.
She walked over to the edge of the wall. It was dark in earnest now, and she was only a silhouette. He followed her. Wanted to watch her, guard her from falling. She stopped at the edge, and he came close enough to see her. Her brown hair fell over her face and caught in her eyelashes and lips. Her face was deep in shadows.
“Of course,” she said, leaning over the wall, still playing, “It’s laughing at me too.”
She sat down again on the edge of the wall, lilting out music. He played along so he wouldn’t be able to speak.
“For the same reasons,” she said.
Keats, September 1820
When I wake up, he is coughing into the sheets beside me. He sleeps- if sleeping it can be called, that agonizing roil of twisted sheets and stabbing pain. He sleeps through his tearing coughs, and I can read the end in the reams of paper ripped from his lungs. In smudged, imperfect typewritten letters I see the neat, businesslike scalpels coming to sever the final cords of flesh that hold his spirit to his body. I can close my eyes and bleed my tongue. I can circle his bony wrist with my hand in an effort to keep his soul.
But when I wake up, he is coughing.
Thin and aching, the thought sings through my head like a stream of golden chemical, gently eating away at the soft tissues. He is going, he is going. Softly, softly, my mind turns to a bright lake of acid. At night, at his side, I can sleep myself into heedlessness, stroking his wasted head- bearing his children, growing old, dying beside him in bruising dreams.
But when I wake up, he is coughing.
In the daytime, when he is not made vulnerable by his bare chest and dropped defenses, I can sleep myself into forgetfulness, walking quietly with him, talking as if nothing is wrong. Grey drops of mercury rain onto his mobile lips from the clear sky, and I can ignore it during the day, when he dresses in black, makes a hard, glossy black shell of life around himself. His palms leave black stains on everything he touches- on my hands, on my neck, on his fork, on the banisters. He is vital. He is black as ink. His teeth cling to daytime like a starving wolf, and I’ve always believed what he says.
But when I wake up, he is coughing.
The morning comes like a crack of light, the only light that can show me how things really stand. Like the dawn of creation, an empty planet where clear vision is possible. The world from space, when the sun begins to cut it’s way out from behind the circle of planet. Death casts a fuzzy shadow across the curve of planet when the first breaking light of the sunrise snaps over the horizon. I turn my head on a pillow of choking feathers, brush clear my eyes, and look at him. His bare white skin. His chains of eyelashes. His black hair like needles in his scalp. His heavy, grey lips, parted raggedly over the words of death, imperfectly typed on thin white paper. I can close my eyes and cling to his living body and forget that the spirit inside is being severed into death.
But when I wake up, he is coughing.
The Old, Acceptable Nature (Hourinthias)
