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.

if dark..

I am made of shell, you know, black shell skin and silver-pearl under my eyelids, silver-pearl inside my mouth, silver-pearl fingernails. Last night, we walked very far under a sky like a fan, but then at midnight, we paused long enough in conversation/thought to notice that we had walked in a full circle and were back at the bridge home. That made neither of us happy, so after thinking for a while, you ran off, and while you ran, I sat on the railing of the bridge and dug in my bag for my matchbook. And when you came back with a jerry-can of gasoline, I had found them, and...

You are made of shell, I know- pale freckled crab-shell, gently perplexed in your eyes, illicit pale red as you talk like snapping claws. This morning we walked very fast under a sky like an ember, breathing in the heavy smoke, breathing in the heavy smoke. The border guards shot at us, but missed. That made us both alive, so we ran through the damp unleaved saplings like a pair of phoenixes, like panthers, and when we came out the other side of the forest, we collided. We collided, rolled, scrambled upright, and found ourselves face-to-face with each other's loaded guns, breathing heavy, burning hard. And we were covered in each other's bruises, and I saw your finger tightening and...

Kino-Eyes, part III

Kino-Eyes, part II

Kino-Eyes, part I

Canto IV
Under the delineated dark stars,
she sang softly to herself. You could
see the way she thought, the burden of it
on her ribcage, the quiet weight of it on
her lungs. Her breathing came shallow.
You could see the way she thought, and yet
the thoughts were hidden. She laid her careful body
on the dark tangle of grass like a forest in a fairy-tale,
and she looked up at the black sky as deep as time and space
and the stars, and you could not read her mind.

Canto X
But the I-beams
but the crack of steel on the
bones of arms,
but what are you
to make of your own lack of
belief?
But under the cracked shelter
there is a crying among the ranks of the women
and a hollow feeling in the chests of the men.
Every limb will be snapped,
Every vein bled dry,
but what of
your own lack of belief?

Canto IV
Softly, ungregarious,
she laid her head on his shoulder.
It was not what she wished for, his shoulder,
and for many days she had kept to herself.
Perhaps he was the answer to those quiet questions
she had not asked. After all, he did fit against her
very well, and if she could sleep there,
perhaps she could forget the he who had
come before, and how her head had dragged
over the spikes of his shoulder.
Softly she let him lead her and wound her for now.

Canto X
If the sun were less pitiless,
If the moon less bloodred
If the earth less hard and cracked
If the sea less swallowing and hateful
Or if the teeth of the animals were not so bared
Or if the arms of the people were not so laden with gunmetal lashes,
Then I were not.

Kino-Eyes, part II

Kino-Eyes, part I

In the quietness of my room (where the air is red)
curtains slip apart and my eyes slip closed and (close-up shot of teeth biting their red lip)
I walk away. You can remember what you’ve done, but not why you’ve done it.
You can remember what you’ve done, but not why you’ve done it.
You can deny that, the little beads of oil on your skin that
you try to wash away with water. The pitted impure surface of your face.
Your adolescent body slips into the water.

There is a cool river. A green roil of love.
There are trees there; trees you’ve seen before when you were
a very young child. There are trees there that put you in mind
of your hand curling around the finger of your mother.
There is a current that looks like a solid thing, like you could
taste it, and it would be better than ribbon candy.

There is a long way to fall. You hang, Missionlike
on a long brown cross and over over ice
over ice on the rocks into the blue roar of movement
music like a dying experiment into your thrashing soul.
There is white water there is a pounding sound, the spray
and the mist and your own young changing body bound up in that.

There is a smell of chemicals.

There is a soft blue cloud, something you forgot.
The suspension of the silk-soft bodies in aerial liquid,
the dance of portions of races in gold and rose sweepings
against a blue, blue sky. There is an eye as deep as space and time,
but pale, pale and open. There is no atmosphere that hides you from that eye.

There is the English-garden drift of snowflakes over the little brown leavings of flowers, over the light of the garden lamppost, onto the waxen white surface of the snow. There are her fingers, the way they lilt over the ivory keys of the piano, the soft singing of her. The way you look up, the warmth of that living room, the movement of your nerves, stumbling tongue.

There is a smell of chemicals.

And you walk back, back over the great walls of the city, into the velvet-trimmed red-scarf dance of the city girls, into the avalanching noise of the city men, into the hands of the city fathers, painted and painted by the city children and you,
you are, you are getting late, tired,
and you, your fists are no salvation
no salvation
no salvation at all.

Purpled against the night sky, her arms are bruised now, her white wrists with the marks of your thumbs, the aural defects of her body are too new for you. You can’t quite understand where she came from, where she was going. You thought you knew her, and then again, perhaps not. And you thought you knew her. But then again, perhaps not. And so it goes again. Purpled against against against the night sky she is not like a banner, too bruised on her white arms, but she is like a banner and she is dancing against the dusk like wine.

And you portray yourself, the red and burnt-gold squares of paint, the daubs, the brushstrokes, the model, the painter. There are things you know of yourself, and those things you paint in, but what of your questions? What of the things you wonder to yourself and never speak of? What of the little codes, the half-shadowed inclusions that you never confess to yourself? And you delineate, and you deny, and you debate, fracture,
dissipate into countless pieces on some floor of marble tile. And that is too hard, too chemical. You wrap yourself into a pale fog, you wrap yourself in the aural liquid of music and acousiomatic, until no one recognizes you.

And no one recognizes you.

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.

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.