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.

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.

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.

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.