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.

dryad's recall

I had forgotten the smell of dying leaves...

I had forgotten until my feet passed over the crumpled brown fallouts, bruising out the smell.

I had forgotten how long this had lain in me like winter.

I have been waiting many days for that smell to come back to me;

I have been watching for the change of color, the bite of air, for many days.

I had forgotten how I wish to shed my leaves, to burn out like a candle in an old forest.

It is my home, the dying in damp brown hollows like familiar haunting hands,

I have been waiting all the burning summer to die so cool and dark.

And every nymph remembers the Golden Ages; I recall the Grey-and-Brown.

I had forgotten leaf mold streaked down my arms, damp dark leaves against my neck.

The cold, dry sun spreads it's light out;

this is the man I will lie down with.

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.

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.

The Mad Days

Guitar strings broke, spiraled up and needled into eyes. The wild chorus of feedback fed like lightning into our ears. Vibrations shook the room, the empty bleachers, the stage. Monitors skittered across the wood. Lightbulbs shattered, sparked above us, a premature light show, and cords wound black smooth sides around our feet as we hung breathlessly onto the curtains that hung on with half their rings. The stage spilt into two jagged islands and we slid toward the center, tangled in the curtains that we had hoped to be held up by. Amps, guitars, drums, went sliding towards the rift, bruising us as they ran by. We caught our hands in a groove of wood and hung there as the world slid everywhere. Then, the lights went and the sound died into nothing. Shakily we crawled out of the wreckage and into the stairwell. All was quiet, but nothing was still.

All was changed.

So began the mad days.



Alone, with no audience, with no stage, with no instruments, we dragged ourselves up to the fire escape. Our splintered hands left blood marks on the walls, our bruises swelled and grew like mushroom clouds, purpling our skin like fruit. Broken water pipelines dripped echoing dark water down in the blacked-out halls, forming pools on the cracked linoleum. The silence from the city so quickly broken breathed on our necks, crackling down our spines.

All was fallen, but he was coming.

the velocity of souls in green fields of water under the hands of barren iron people

eyes on the sky between
Mars and Saturn,
eyes on the ground,
.....black dirt,
.........grey stone,

rice paddy
..rice paddy
....rice paddy

baby, you're going home.

fingertips, razors of grass, broadeaf
hands up, waiting on:
..time
....time
......time..

time doesn't leave you alone.

high on the ramparts of guardrails
............ (and views)
under the arches of skies and your muse

money
..cigars
....chalk
......and dreams

rice paddy;
baby, come home.

vigilante girl remembers summer 1998

here comes the vigilante summer, 1998-

talking in theives' cant and building the emerald

city. formal shepherds of thought, double-breasted

replace the homespun canvas boys who used to

carry the staffs. the country laid out like a story-

book with eyes like owls. shoes as vital as life

and bread holding our feet together. this is

'98.

hereitcomes.

straw and wheatpaste and black paint

making a scarecrow man to lead us where

the shepherds couldn't take us. a voice ten

thousand times bigger than its owner, and

of course we thought him the guru. highwaymen

know better than we do. our purses were slit,

leaving us only the bundles of our pasts, uneven

gaits like lamed horses, treading water like a yellow

brick road. trying to make our own justice like

vigilantes, waiting for 1998.

hereitcomesfallingdown.

looking back to berlin, nine years past, bowing

and chasing each other like children back to israel.

tripping over a river with no ford. stealing back

into oz. we lay for twenty seconds in feigned sleep,

and then got up to eat. we were lost in the forest

until we grew up; and then we came back to the

world, and could not stop thinking of emerald arches

and overexposure.

hereitcomes nineteenninetyeight

starlings hopping through blackcurrant bushes

mockingbirds reading mood verse and laughing

mods and hippies in intersecting venns with jews

I on a six-winged horsethatcannotfly

intersecting over a patch of fields, built around

the emerald city and the lost forest, giving up

on homemade and store-bought shepherds and

hereitcomes lionofjudah nineteenninetyeight

Molasses Cookies and the Third Time the Rooster Crows

instrumental conversations, pt. II

Flat black eyes looked up from over Ian’s hollow-body. Six weeks had passed since the Transverse Music Festival, and Ian had gotten as slow and dark as molasses. I sat down on the bar stool, tracing the white carvings in the black wood with my finger. The stool rocked on its spindly legs.

Ian looked at me from over his hollow-body. A shield. I shrugged. Ian had called me here, and Ian would start the conversation.

The clock- made out of a tire, with oversized hands- ticked heavily. The curtains were closed. I got up and opened them. I went and sat back down, and Ian got up and closed them again.

There was nothing really to do. Ian started playing the song- The Chameleon Glare of Turning Hearts- from the Transverse show, and I got up and started making cookies.

I knew my recipe as well as Ian knew his song, and for ten minutes, our recall went on in perfect rhythm. I cracked an egg into my green mixing bowl while Ian experimented with the first bridge. I measured out molasses while Ian’s molasses eyes followed his fingers up the fretboard. I made little mounds of batter while Ian hummed along with the ending. I set the oven as the last notes rang out, and then I turned around and I could tell Ian was ready to talk.

“It’s been six weeks,” he said slowly. I looked down at my hands. I knew that already, Ian.
“So what do I do?”
“You’re asking me?” I was more surprised than angry, for now, but I could tell that I would be more angry than surprised before this was over. I brushed aside the flour on the counter and sat down.
“I guess not,” sighed Ian. “I wrote a new song. It’s called Peter Grieves. Can I play it for you?”

I knew before he started playing what it was going to say. That was how things were with Ian and me. I thought he was acting like molasses, so I made molasses cookies, pretending they weren’t carrying a message. Ian played the song, pretending it wasn’t talking to me, to give me the message he didn’t dare to speak.

Walks on the water of sparrows and thieves,
Gives up the standard, denies and grieves,
Flies you in through a slate-blue door
Falters and fades and falls cold on the floor.

I don’t think you’re reading the story the way it’s written
These battles and flights of birds are the resurrection..

Peter grieves and Jesus dies
A slave girl blinks her peacock eyes
“Hey, aren’t you one of Jesus’ guys?”
Well, mockingbirds’ mouths are built for lies.
Harsh as birth the rooster sings
Down falls the hawk with broken wings
The owl is sleeping when the wolf-dog springs
You’ve got me, I’ve got nothing.

Down in the streets there are fish and men,
Broken bread and fox’s den
Peter wakes up to a blackbird’s claws,
Over blood-rust cities a black crow caws.

Peter grieves and Jesus dies
Feathers fall down in covered eyes
Rips them open, ignores their cries
a raucous chorus of vows and tries.
I can tell you what daylight brings:
A cold dead air like diamond rings.
Peter fails that to which he clings
And you’ve got me, I’ve got nothing.

Asks without faith and gets quail like hell
Rises like a heron for show and tell
Lives and dies in a phoenix flame
With an upside-down cross to remember his name.

Peter grieves and Jesus dies
Money turns ash by the souls he buys
A new stream bursts and an old one dries
And a crippled pelican finally flies.
Dead birds don’t own fears or kings,
It’s the lives ones that the serpent stings
Peter grieves but Jesus lives,
and we’re red eagles on what he gives.

Ian finished on a D minor, hovered over it to let me get the full effect, and finally lowered his guitar. We watched each other for a while. Then I sighed my surrender.
“Okay, Ian,” I said. “This time you win.”

Ian got up, took off the brown cardigan I had been wondering about. It was too hot in Ian’s apartment for cardigans. Beat me to the oven when the buzzer went.

“Peter grieves...” I said musingly, and Ian made a sort of imaginary movement towards his shield of a guitar. The score still stood pretty even between us, after all.