neutral milk hotel #2. can't remember if i posted 'a love song for jeremy barnes' on here...
--
jeff and i were hiding underneath the tumbledown shadow of the wall where the nettles grow. at first, i couldn’t figure out why we were there, but after a while i guessed that it was that jeff didn’t want max and ellis to find us. (a more confusing reason than i needed- why should jeff care whether we were found together or not?) i shifted a little in the nettles, so i could see his face. he was watching intently through a crack in the wall, but I could tell he knew i was watching him. his eyes ticked left and right like a clock.
last night had been one of the most straightforward in my life. jeff was not given to many words, but we had stood together for a long time, and so he spoke a little, and in between words he looked so bitter and disgusted that i had to mention it.
“jeff, you've got something on your mind?"
"something, yeah." his face read like 'my dream girl don't exist'. he looked at me straight in the half-dark and i knew what he meant.
"something in your eyes, certainly," i said. "am I supposed to take that as the sum of your feelings?"
"feelings,” said jeff in the voice of a dark brown poison, “you mean for you?”
i was very curious and very hurt, because i had always thought jeff’s feelings for me covered more than a residual woundedness.
“i guess i mean for me. i just wondered what made you so… i don’t know. whatever it is that’s in your eyes. it’s not happy but not really very sad. nor angry. maybe all.”
“yeah,” said jeff. “maybe all. maybe i’m savage. i used to know you, but whoever you are now i don’t like to be with.”
i couldn’t really be taken aback; i had expected something like that. jeff was savage, but looked something damp and dark as well. it wasn’t quite the same. i was supposed to be angry at jeff, not he with me. i tried to muster anger but there was nothing there. it was getting dusky; i climbed up steps towards the house and jeff stood there in the gold-syrup of the outdoor light and burned black. the wind riffled through the cedar shrubs.
today, though, i didn’t quite dare to say anything. max and ellis walked past so close we could hear them talking, and it turned out to be us they were talking about.
“she never said she loved him,” said ellis, telling my secrets like shedding careless skins. “she never said anything, but the way she looked when his name came up…”
“he loved her,” said max. “he said so sometimes, and when he didn’t, i could tell because he watched her so hard.”
they paused, and jeff’s eyes made a blank track up to mine and back to his crack again.
“they’re both so stupid…” said max, just hesitant enough to keep us both from hating him. “they won’t be together and they won’t be apart.”
“they don’t know anything,” said jeff fiercely, but there we were, lying in the shadow of the stone wall among the nettles, hiding from max and ellis. the world just slid by. i looked away from jeff and admitted the truth to myself: everything max and ellis said was true. everything was true.
jeff’s elbows were pressing into the wet dirt and the nettles wrote angry red sonnets on his forearms. my hip was pressed into the dirt and the nettles brushed dancing red welts on my neck. my submission to his concealment hurt.
in the nettles with jeff magnum
friendly with you (thyme honey)
speak to me only with your eyes
tell me a story with no surprise ending
where I'm more real than I am wise
and I lost all the stamps for the letter i'm sending to you
make me friendly with you
understanding goes pretty far
and if you haven't got it, I'll settle for whatever you are most of all;
after all, I'm in the stars
and if I can't sound good, I can sparkle 'til you can't really see
and make you friendly with me
humming like a hummingbird,
bleaching like bones
on the sidewalks of our cities,
on the beaches of our summer homes
your silence isn't quite golden yet
but don't turn to midas, cause you'll kill me if you do
and that's not friendly of you
i feed you stories flavored with honey
candied with roses, but you don't get rosy like me.
you feed me apples and flowers and sky
but I need something richer to help me get by
let me hide in your bunker with custards and cakes
wear velvet, drink coffee to keep me awake
let me dance 'til the night disappears
and won't you be the one who's been keeping me here?
I want to be friendly with you.
--
song of my own composition. possibly to be recorded with clips of a laughing girl and a morrocan tour guide talking about thyme honey, in harpsichord/hammond organ/bass/brass tones.
maritime revenge story
my family is telling me it's time i make my peace with you. it's a peculiar idea, and not one i'm particularly open to. you've morphed, in my mind, into something like a giant squid, roiling through angry green water. luckily, you've never managed to become something so cliche as a white whale. you would be very hard to let go. you might be the last thing i see before i die.
i was talking to ahab last night, talking so long that my ear was sore from the phone, and i could hardly wake up this morning- he didn't seem to think i needed to make peace with you. but even though i love him, i don't think him sane. his advice only feeds my longing to be right. when we talk, our conversations are dogged with wasted years that taste like salt. maybe i ought to make my peace with you.
certainly, it would be better for all of us, but the trouble is, i've finally hit on a plan for revenge that might actually work (you, my sea monster, have inspired more ridiculous plans than any other sea monster, I promise). because you're just a sea monster, just as naive as can be, this plan will work.
also, it will finally give me an excuse to run away to sea, and while i'm there, thinking of you tied in swollen knots on the beach back home, it will give me an opportunity to taste real salt that isn't running off my eyes. and i could write ahab a letter and tell him that i'd finished my work and if he would finish his, we could sail the world together; and he'd phone me that night and we'd talk for a few hours and come to the conclusion that he'd never think quite hard enough about me, and i'd be unhappy in the light of his nautical cigars, and that we really shouldn't be together. i'd spend hours wondering if i'd said all that only because he was saying it, or if i really meant it. then i'd have to come back to you, trapped and breathless on the beach and tell you that you'd ruined things between me and the man i loved, and i'd sit down with my back against your slow-drying undersea skin and look out to sea.
you'd be my only comfort then.
trans//lucent
I woke up this morning with the oddest feeling that my skin was translucent, and that where he put his fingers through my mouth and where he put his fingers on the notches in my spine were sparkling purple through my clear volatile skin. That made me sit up suddenly, with terror and some beautiful memories, and that brought me face-to-face with the mirror opposite my bed. My face was very pale and violet; I ran to the bathroom and splashed hot water on my face, trying to get it back to it's ordinary depth and vigor. Red splashed across my face where the water hit, but then it crawled back away. I looked myself deep in the eyes (and my eyes looked like wounded purple bruises).
I put on a great deal of makeup.
the air that looks like his skin
he is a ghost, and he never stops talking about it. i listen, because that's what i do; i listen, and it's too hard to break the habit now. for years i've been working up into this: i don't have much to say, not unless i'm writing it down, but i can listen; talk to me and see.
those are no mixed messages, and he settled in with me for a long time. he talked. i listened. we made music and people photographed us standing together like that; the city got old and rusted and then the country got grey and faded. he talked, i listened. his eyes turned red-brown. his skin turned pale grey. i held onto my color in little snatches as it tried to escape but still made time to listen.
the buildings crumbled and turned to rubble, the trees burned down, the roads cracked and the sun set. he noticed it-- he said to me, 'look. the world is falling into destruction,' and i answered, like usual, with a well-placed nod. 'i am a ghost,' he said. puzzled. he was puzzled. i gave him one comforting hand, but it just slipped through the air that looked like his skin.
he went through cycles after that: resignation. terror. rage. bitterness. irony. amusement. some days he clung to me-- not with his hands; they had no substance. with his eyes and tongue and the air around him. other days, he pushed against me with his mind, telling me to go, telling me to go and leave him the hell alone. "why?" he asked, and only my eyes answered with suffering and foundering and no answer. that was what he needed. sometimes, he even comforted me. some days he was resigned and he took me in the arms of his eyes and told me that he would be okay and i didn't have to cry for him. some days he flung little black bones of wit on the ground before me, substance i could have touched but didn't dare to, and i listened only, staying out of his range.
he is a ghost, and i ventured to promise him that i'm okay with that. i am okay with that-- but, oh-- he never stops talking about it.
[interlude for some exciting things]
exciting thing # 1: this: [link of wonder] is a demo by Victor from wolf tickets but also by me. The original lyrics before he mixed them up to fit his music are at www.virb.com/leedswolfgirl.
exciting thing # 2: the commander thinks aloud, by the Long Winters. you should be listening. also Staralfur, by Sigur Ros, and watching the clip from the Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou.
exciting things # 3: red converse hi-tops with red laces
exciting thing # 4: I found out that Big Country actually released a bunch of songs, not just one awesome one. If you at all are interested in synthesized scottish folk-rock with cool martial drumming, run and find 'Fields of Fire', also, 'In A Big Country'.
edit: exciting thing # 5: A blog entry entitled: I can't be bothered to write this...
edit # 2: less exciting thing #1: my link of wonder is failing to work for some wonderful reason of it's own, and I really am annoyed with blogger, because also they make formatting as hard as it can possibly be. so here is the link in full form: http://http//www.rpmchallenge.com/component/option,com_comprofiler/task,userProfile/user,4156/Itemid,296/
around the corner
Or perhaps you weren't waiting
under the pane of that
window, and around the corner,
and I was patient.
Your colloquialisms, Sistene ceiling,
monied and parents,
(My brother & Abi laugh at you)
they are little charms
worn inside your shirt to guard you.
Or perhaps you were the stock man of
the formulaic universe, the damp ankles
of you, humming in the rain;
waiting around the corner.
I am not competing for you
so pretty as that, over tea
over dancing.
Or perhaps you weren't
waiting there...
--
But no! I am science, I am the triptych, the orbital burnings of fortuitous chemicals. You have no conception, the way you theorize, the prestige, when I devour galaxies. Under the study window, in alien ions and scaled naturalistic epicenters, to the weird Uranic music, I hurtle against your carven baseboards. And around the corner, the mutated bodies of Abi and my brother shake with supressed laughter as you bend to touch my scientific arms. You lily-white, you social burden of another man's age! The chambers of the heart, the stomachs of a sheep, the chambers of a nautilus-- well, which is to be ours? The burn of the graphic chemicals in your drink, that may even have come from my hands. I may even have been a chemical burn. And so I press my postulates on your geographic society. I cannot undeceive you, but I can paint what you see under my microscope or I can interpose my body between the end of your telescope and the start of the sky. Don't you touch my chemical burn!
leaking pen [second chances (lark remix)]
the room is spinning, spinning with the quiet electric sound of your voice. the windows are melting, reshaping, gliding over the landscapes and seascapes. sometimes the cold creeps in; something like cold creeps in.
it's love that finds forgiveness, lain alongside you as you lie quiet. it's love that moves likes cold through me and I have no power at all. when you're gone, I miss you, and when you come back I wish you were gone. when you're gone, it makes me quiet, and when you come back it burns my tongue.
there's something smudging my hands like ink from a leaking pen.
there's something collecting in my mouth like ink from a leaking pen.
there's something staining my shirt like ink from a leaking pen.
nothing's good; nothing's right, but I love you.