Kino-Eyes, Part V

Canto IV
Tonight, she is a golden girl.
Tonight, she hopes she can take the blame for that.
But tonight, her father is beside her like a father,
like a father proud of his daughter. And she knows
she cannot take the blame. She hopes her heart
won’t pull her awake from him.
She prays for that.
They ask her to
pray,
at times.

Canto X
The poisonous sweetness of movement,
the slide of closeness,
the disgusting thick billows of lechery,
and you dare to break promises?
The world falls and turns around you.
Deny your ownership, of course. Deny your
ownership and burn the world without yourself.
Look in the glass, like Eden, turn off that road
and you won’t be alone like you are now.
You are so alone like now.

Canto IV
The soft pale gold drops of tears on her cheeks
are too moving. He burns like the ache of loss.
She burns like the trust of self. He takes her in
his arms. No daughter ever too tall for that. He
cradles her like the infant she is still. He says she
should never go, and she should never be alone,
and he says she is beautiful despite the stains
ringing her from thigh to ankle. Despite the scars
she took on her neck.

Canto X
Are you sure your coast is that clear?
The naked crabs are ripping steely things
and you shouldn’t walk alone through that.
Under these skies,
under the sweat of the hot sunset,
under the chemical burn of the murderous skies
are you---
sure?

tiger sanctuary

he wrote a letter home, a little bit about how he felt and a little bit about how he missed me, and some of what he was doing. i guess my favorite part should have been about how he missed me, but my favorite part was when he said, "there are monks there running a tiger sanctuary. you can go there and go sit with them," and i think he meant the monks, but it suddenly sounded like an invitation to hang out with tigers: you can go there and go sit with them, and i'll be here without this separation of a continent and an ocean. and they'll velvet their claws and lie vulnerable on their sides because they'll know it's a safe place, this tiger sanctuary. and we won't worry about the way the world talks about us, because we'll know it's a safe place, the tiger sanctuary. there will be broad green leaves above our eyes.

She Did A Lot Of (Acid)

"There's this church near my house, one of those tall warm ones with elaborate windows that spreads out for a block; that's always filled with tame sparse people and organ music. I sit on the steps a lot, cigarette dangling from my fingers; I sit there a lot waiting for him, or for things to get good or glorious. They're broad and stone and in the spring they are cold against the back of my legs."
"And life is like a cigarette hanging from my fingers; it'll burn out and I'll drop it and people will walk over it in the street and some of the people from the church will be annoyed that I left it there, in front of their building."

So she stood up and ground out her cigarette and flicked it away. Those fingers of hers, that sick surety and yearning of them... something about their casual gesture after the words she'd just spoken seemed to me horribly cruel, and I wished I would say something to check her.

sharpies&spraypaint love

to the right: ...not really prose-poetry at all, but rather, some (lo-quality webcam) photos of some artcards i drew at starbucks last monday. i was waiting for my sister to finish her dance lesson. usually, i draw a few and then leave them in chapbooks in the poetry section of the adjacent Chapters, but i was so proud of these ones that i wanted to take them home and photograph them. also, i made nine because i was there so long; normally i only do one or two. i'm thinking of leaving them at starlight books, because it is obviously ridiculously more awesome than chapters, and also i have seen some very cool boys there, and i like to think of my artcards in the hands of very cool boys.

also included: ...i have no camera available right now, but here is a (lo-quality webcam) photograph of my new shirt which i spray-painted this a.m. it is of louise brooks, because louise brooks is the coolest ever. i may or may not add text; am toying with a quote from the little prince or alice's adventures in wonderland. curiouser and curiouser? maybe.

(edit: i just now realized that i wrote 'lo-quality'. this would be inexcuseable but for the fact that instead of being an annoying shortcut, it is proof that i think lo-fi.)

cats-eye glasses

i don't watch horror films ever, but sometimes i imagine there's the plot of one slipping insidious fingers into my life. a deep unexplained possession of my soul that whispers to me at night: buy yourself cats-eye glasses. and it feels like i can't help but listen.

don't leave me; right now you're the only thing that's keeping me from giving into it.

postcard for lukács

I found it hard to wait for you. I was bored with the momentary boredom of forgetting that you’re waiting and then remembering again. I was bored with the fascination boredom of studying hard your red shoes against the sidewalk. I was bored enough to go.

I knew you were leaving for Paris the next morning, and that if I didn’t wait, I would not see you again until the end of the summer, but I was bored with that grey-fuzz boredom that settles in your chest. So I wrote you a note.

I told you about the people passing. I wondered whether a tea rose was a pretty as it sounds. I wrote you a few lines of poetry. I folded it up and laid it on the bench. I acknowledged the possibility that someone else might pick it up before you.

I blew a kiss down the cobbled street, to where you would come from if you came. If I dared, I’d wait for you all night. But I have this momentary boredom settled on my shoulders, and I walk away south, into the blue-grey city with my red shoes.

life and how to live it; academy st, march 16/08

there were analogies running across the room like tightropes; i clung to your hand and we put our heads close together to watch everybody talking. i kept making puzzled motions of my head; you kept shifting your troubled eyes to all the different people. you looked at me. I looked back at you. we both looked up, up into the high arched ceiling, and there were tightropes running across the ceiling like analogies.
"yeah," you said, and I nodded, and we cautiously stood up without touching anybody else and climbed the ladder to the web of ropes and some people paused to look up as we began to drift across them or slide against each other at that precarious height. and the wind whipped in from the open windows so that my hair was in my mouth; and our hands and arms dissected into a snowfall of dead skin on the watching faces. eventually it turned to dawn and my body trembled with exhaustion but we were very close together by then, and your eyes were even greener than mine and we had tied ourselves into the cords-- but not on purpose, we admitted as we hung there like insects to the vast inescapable spider of life and how to live it.

and your eyes were even greener than mine as they caught my gaze and your tongue was split like a cloven hoof as it caught my thoughts and analogies and the knowledge of our own earth-white pretensions held us like cords so we could not love each other, but i loved you like mad.

it was eleven-thirty, and the room was crowded with people- tall overtired men in business suits and brittle women with magazine hairstyles that didn't hide their hard unbeautiful spirits; people we used to know in highschool who thought they were punk or goth or that the world would always love them; poets with beautiful green beat-death on their faces and hungry eyes, soccer moms, latent unintelligible physicists and sentimental artisans; friendly middle-aged horrors of men; controversial and disgusting university students, some of whom we had made love to. Decorous or cruise-going grandparents, suave IT foreigners, primal achievements in the form of 21-year-old pseudo-surfer boys, grey-toothed androgynous city-people who were running up on 27 but not noticing; pink-haired hardcore girls with fangs tattooed on their bodies; sane slightly bald at 32 relatives, English teachers and Rastas with letters dancing before their eyes; hallowed hallowed religious 29-year-olds who were indistinguishable from normal worlds but by their self-righteousness; guitar-playing bums still as drunk at 35 as they were at 25. Pretty laughing conniving girls with sugar-brown hair on the arms of displaced bodies they called their boyfriends. And you and I, trying to face the fact that we, too, could be typified in six or seven disgusting words.

Kino-Eyes, Part IV

There is no quiet place in the slivers of moon.
You walk there, you lace among the grey shards,
and your breath roils inside the cage of your chest.
Your feet are slow, slow and your blood is
frenzied, masculine, flung out against the pulse of your
muscles (and the pulse of your muscles sings and screams).
And there is a smell of chemicals,
of thick poisonous reds,
but you can't worry about that.
You feet half-run
and your feet don't stumble.

Rock after rock, displaced, tumbles down the
brown hill, collecting rock after rock and force,
the clouds of dust, the thunder of it. You lose your footing.
The slim green tree at the bottom of the hills, the curve
of soft brown trunk, the new leaves-- what if that were buried?
You fall faster.

Over the grey edge, the burn of the sky. You are cold alone
you are cold and so alone and the wind whistles its dirge past your
forsaken body. And there is no young green tree to break your fall.
So it is the taste of the ocean closing its forbidding tongue around you.

And she is sorry, the sea-nymph. The flick of her green-grey hands through the water,
the quiet paddling towards you. Your lungs are full of water, your body limp with hurt.
The sting of your face against the water knocked you out; you rock and sink. She holds
your head quiet up in the air.

The things that made you laugh, the things that washed softly over the damp place of your soul, quiet white paper, she is that. On the grey sand of the shore, she drags your unconsciousness, and there is peace in the murmur of her waves on the shore. The water in your lungs, the salt collecting in swirls on your skin and eyelids, the weakness of your air-deprived body, they hold you back from asking your question: what does she want of you? Well, what does she want of you, do you think? The seaweed weave of her hair and hands are not filled yet. Alone, she slips back into the water... or are there knives under her feet? Alone, you lie on the shore, and you think of a green tree, and also a green nymph, and neither wishes you torn like that.

You smell some dark chemicals.

guess what?

"guess what?" you said.

i thought, you found a message in a blue glass bottle. you counted, and there are a thousand reasons you love me. even in your head, everything makes sense. you had a vision of a dystopian future and you think it will come true. you want to make your fortune in fortune cookies. you know where we can find the perfect place to dance all night (dance all night). you made friends with an israeli insurance agent. you keep a jar of cherry candies in your attic. the decoder ring that came in your cereal opens a portal to the world of our dreams. you finally gathered all the courage you ever thought you might need. some people have stopped bothering you. even at night, everything feels okay. you have a new imaginary friend, and you think she's going to take my place in your heart. you keep tripping over invisible red lines, and you want to know what it means. the dinosaurs aren't all dead yet. you want us to publish a novel together. there are no more noses to bend out of joint. there's this girl in boston who found out she could kill sad people just by smiling, and you think we should try it. you're through with risking life and limb for the coupon. even with all the madness we've gone through, everything is still perfect. you want to start a band and invite all our saddest friends to make the happiest music we can think of. you've got a new name for everything. you sold a poem. even with all the senseless mistakes you've made, everything has a reason. or maybe you counted, and there are a thousand reasons you love me.

"what?" i said.
"i'm bored," you said.

methodist revolt/marxist historian

methodist revolt

my father had
sidewhiskers like karl marx,
but i was not allowed to know
who marx was. i sat in that pew every
sunday buying and selling my soul and
he preached in a loud voice that
hurt my head.

my father died in 1958. the whole town
burned down stores and made
neo-surrealist drawings. i
sat in my treehouse and read
john 14 and burned holy candles.
(someone told me the candles were
holy. i burned my fingers lighting them.
someone said candles could be holy.)

two weekends after the funeral,
you danced with me.

i think you taught me a lesson,
and,
in retrospect,
i didn't want to learn it.

marxist historian

i love you because of how
your glasses wobble on your face;
and your wide mouth
allures me.

i used to think you were dispensable,
like the paper napkins that we never
used at my house
and God can raise sons of abraham
from these stones.

my soul is neo-surrealist
and my soul is neo-surrealist
but your soul is wholly unusual.
build me a spaceship-timemachine,
take me forward 400 years into another galaxy,
and help me write a marxist history.

we make a bed of
stones and paper napkins
and i
take off your marxist glasses.

going without

i feel better going without you, like a small acorn nymph. i am curled inside a little warm world, eating stories and red currants when i am hungry, thinking of you only when the mists are too busy drifting off the wheat fields to talk to me.

yesterday i lilted from leaf to leaf of a beech tree, making raindrops fall onto the forest floor, and suddenly! you were there, writing in a notebook whose pages were wrinkled like they were left in the rain. i skipped down onto your shoulder (and you noticed me as much as usual), and read over your shoulder:

mon amour a des ailes,
j'ai les chaussures sales
je suis dans la mosquée
je suis froid d'aller sans elle

i sat down on your left shoulder, content to think you couldn't feel me through your corduroy. i twisted a bit of oak twig i carried with me into your hair. you looked away and i made three smudged footprints in your ink, and then i flew away.

going without you is almost my favorite.

missing alan lyle and things that happen because of it

I can't resist, at the least appropriate times, mentioning that alan lyle is missing from wherever I am. In the middle of a fight is my favorite, especially if I'm mad at myself for losing my cool. I choke down some futile tears and say, "alan lyle should be here right now." usually i walk away then, while the other person is too angry to ask who alan lyle is anyways.

they probably wouldn't understand, even if i put it in the plainest terms about wide fields to lose a business rival in, endless split rail fences without him, a hardwood pavilion with alan's arms around me. it is because they don't understand that i miss alan lyle.

sometimes there's an awkward silence in the middle of a conversation with a total stranger (like tonight, when i was talking to the fjc student, in between when i said, 'yeah, i'd kind of like to learn the bass,' and our rapid thinking of what to say next). i leaned forward conspiratorially and said, 'alan lyle ought to be here,' and he asked for an explanation and i shook my head. 'alan lyle... not something you would understand,' but then he shrugged and said he thought he would, and for two minutes, i didn't miss alan lyle.

it took me thirty minutes on the guitar to miss him again once i got home. alan lyle has been missing for a long time. sometimes i thinking singing a song for him isn't enough. (alan lyle, i know you avoid thinking about me, and that includes reading my blog, but if you ever happen to read this... i think you're missing from places i need you.)

keen lake

neutral milk hotel #3.
--
something about the rhythm of the day or the taste of the air made me tired early; i lay on the dock and dreamed of words and phrases that i couldn’t find uses for: ‘aerie’, ‘murky’, ‘soviet lover’, ‘consequential ankle’. it was that hour when the air comes in colors you’re not used to; i could taste old blue decades and smooth soft green in the cool and grey of it. i lay on the dock half-awake, pretending there were epics about me hidden in the weathered wood against my face. the sun was down and i was cool or grey.

the earth looks better from a star, and i thought i might be on one, so i sighed and decided to write a letter to julian.

i have a pen and paper, so i can finally write you, i started, and then thought for several minutes about scratching out that line before going on. hello, julian. how are you? i know you don’t know where i am, even though sometimes i feel like you do, but i am well and right now i’m on a star called keen lake, and it’s getting dark and i think i’m catching signals. are you happy? or did i already ask that?

i’ve been thinking about what it might be like if i could… well, not make a perfect world, but just rearrange this one a little. at first it was just simple things i would change, like putting music that i liked on the radio, or making more oceans and rainstorms. i would make myself a good painter; i would have more chances to drive down highways with no destination. then, my head got a little more discontent, and i thought about having songs come true, walking through the black forest that i used to dream about (it used to be in my head more than just a forest in germany. there were wolves that talked about scarlet and witches, and the trees were endless and i terrified myself just by standing still there). even greater plans: saying goodbye to you in an industrial-revolution train station, making threads of thought through an atlantis-like universe and finding that i could reach you with them. missing you to the tune of a song i wrote in a butter-yellow kitchen while you worked for something we both knew you wouldn’t get. kissing you as a technicolor mermaid and watching you walk down a long dirt road as a boy made only partly of flesh, and made partly of old guitar strings, pocket-watch cogs, cellophane from 1965, and a jacket given you by a hobo. and last of all i planned to make a world where i could use words and phrases like ‘durst’ and ‘ashen’, ‘wolf fleet’ and ‘watchword’.

i shouldn’t be writing you, since i left to leave you. but then i thought you might be my soviet lover, and i realized i didn’t want to risk losing you if you were. i’m not coming home- not yet; the clock isn’t saying to- but i think you should try to find me because i know that’s what you’ve been wanting to do.

i addressed it ‘julian koster, 10,000 different interstates, skytown, illinois’ and then lay on my back watching the stars, wishing my first sentence hadn’t been a lie.