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