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.