this is admittedly a placeholder for a post I want to write about the film Cache, which I saw tonight. 

(key words to remind myself: sons, timing, faces, language)

It is often only later that I can fully appreciate the neurotic peculiarity–sometimes even desperation–of actions I have turned to so readily in the past. Fear, inertia, the drive for comfort, these are powerful masters.  

Filling a mug with water in my kitchen, sock feet on swollen checkered tile, a memory:

living in Paris, I often would make my tea by reaching into the tiny alcove that was my bathroom, all shower, and turn the faucet as hot as it would go. Steam rising everywhere, I would fill my mug. Good enough for the cheapest black tea sold at monoprix. But there was a kitchen just down the hall, usually unoccupied during the odd hours I kept. I even owned a pot I could have used to heat the water instead of the microwave. But something about that just seemed like far too much. The possibility of seeing others, especially other American strangers, was overwhelming in its horror. In those panics, late night, early morning, mid-evening, alone, I did not want to see anyone. There were of course many nights I went out, bought drinks to both hide and forget my poverty, spoke awful French with charming, well-dressed foreigners, did a great number of other things, but in Paris I slept alone. I spent much of my time alone, locked in that room drinking tea and trying to write. I do not, in fact, have much writing from that period. But I did spend a lot of time trying, and a lot of time alone, and that was how I did and did not want it.

for a moment today I felt bitter and pissy, and I thought,

Sure, I could write a better poem than you
with words bloodthirsty, wet, and true

for while you play allusive bombardier 
I do not find your hagiography sincere

I would give your diligence its due–
for what man’s a man that knows he’s through?

if I had charms to put to sleep
all but the tenth of you that I would keep

Sweet Christ I really am no good at rhyming. It’s fine, it’s fine. I’ll just… avoid it. Contemporary poets can do that, right? Or start writing in German…

The pattern continues. A rephrasing, more explicit, of a previous thought.

Around 7pm, I am seized by mania. I can barely keep myself from sprinting down the street. My clockwork head is pressed to the ground, is rushing past in hurried conversation with ghosts. My rag of a body is whipped through the sky. My hands shake, my vision blurs. There are so many words they almost choke me. The miracle knowledge that blood pumps through my veins overwhelms me. I feel a desperate and moral obligation to contribute all I can, to pour myself into the world.

By 9:30, I’m a pile of ash. A bus stop garbage can. A thick ink that seeps its way into telephones, crawls out the other side in a keening whine. Sometimes something intervenes: a book, a body, the cloying taste of sleep. Sometimes not.

By now, at least, I have learned to let the waves pass. 

I had actually forgotten– last night in a daze before sleep, I decided to kick it into retro with some “automatic writing”. I use scare quotes because I mean less “messages from Mars” and more “high school English class”. Putting pen to paper while barely awake, without thinking about what word may follow the next. So, unedited, the notepad resting on my sheets:

  it does not hurt to take a walk around the neck of night, at times the whistling birds of home fall silent, dropping feathers in the porcelain bowls old Italian matrons.

  "Look,“ I turn to you and said–

  The leaves are losing their shapes, the stars are cascading like watermelon seeds

  the sky is full of children, small and racing

  the heavens are a baseball diamond parking lot

  dirt and anticipation

  "Look,” I said, “do you know her?” We both turn to look at him, long fingers on her long coat and you said Let me lay my arm upon your shoulder a while.

  Night closed in on us like an Atlantic wave. We hushed.

  I sent you a letter full of pearls but the wind caught them, scattered them across all the dirt between my hands and your mouth. Small trees sprang up, and creeks, and the drive to adventurous conversation, strangers passing through suddenly moving their lips to express our anticipation.

–

Then I thought I’d make a quick attempt at reworking the above text to see what would happen:

It does not pain me, to walk around the neck of night
when whistling birds of home fall hushed
feathers dropping into old Italian porcelain

“Look,” I turned to you
the leaves are losing their shapes
the stars are children, watermelon seeds

Night, the great Atlantic wave
floods the baseball diamond over me
and I hush against your dampened coat

Wind scatters your letter full of pearls
feeds the dirt between our apartments
trees spring up nourished by your mouth

Strangers passing through
catch on our frequencies
and feel our words, knocking at their teeth

In the spirit of NaNoWriMo, I am going to try and get my writing-shit together, even if only a teensy bit, by trying to write something every day. Generating content while trying to avoid any judgement of its quality.

It speaks to my personality that I don’t think I can do this without at least the illusion of an audience, some collection of internet ghosts– ghosts that will silently hold me culpable for my failures. I suppose I could create a new, separate space, but I feel scattered enough already, I want to avoid something that would allow even the tiniest bit more hesitation.

I considered picking a project to work on, shit sure they all need it, but I’ve got too many things on my plate (and too little certainty or focus) to pick something. Perhaps as I try to write as much as possible, something will push its way to the front row. For now I am content to push for whatever words will come to me.

I read your words, and I feel a false comfort. Getting as close to your thoughts as the approximation of writing can get, I feel as though I have not been absent from the primary stream of your life these past four months. Holding the page close to my face, glasses off, wrapped up in a bed you’ve never slept in, I internalize your syntax, I imagine the words I would say in response. The act of reading you feels intimate, like an exchange.

But I know this game. I have been the one across the sea. Time changes everyone, a subtle erosion, and you and I are slightly stranger to each other now than we were. You have been in my thoughts, but you have not heard them. You have not been there in the early morning to hear what I was dreaming. This distance terrifies me. And yet… here, then, comes another opportunity to unpack you. In the passenger seat of a smoky black car in Los Angeles, I will look into your hurricane eyes and there will be new codes to read.

There will always be something new in you to struggle to grasp, always new wild territories of myself to embrace all the more through sharing them with you. The cold slice of fear across my cheeks is merely evidence that hot blood pulses through me. 

Oh, even the self in months to come, raging at some petty infraction, some ill-communicated slight, the self that shatters telephones and takes disaffected men to bed, even she cries out to you, come home, come home. 

Come to the Chi-Town Clown Revue on Sunday. 

In which I am anxious and apologetic

Sometimes on the bus home, you realize with a wince fifteen minutes too late that you used the word “retarded” talking to someone with a family member with Down Syndrome, whom you have heard speak about the way they hate that word, how they wish that people would fucking think before they perpetuate something hurtful. 

Sometimes at a play with a friends, you use a phrase that your father’s Oklahoma family uses in a casual way only to remember that it’s actually pretty racist, and your charming, partly black friend makes you blush. Sometimes while talking you can’t help but describe yourself as slutty, while a professor sits next to you. Sometimes you can’t keep your big mouth shut. Sometimes while walking down the sidewalk you can’t help but lose it over the cracks. Sometimes you realize that everyone can see you brush the dandruff of your jacket. Sometimes you assume an intimacy that isn’t there. 

Sometimes you like to think you’re a good person, someone considerate and thoughtful and deliberate with their words. Sometimes you just feel bad.

Mostly I am just really anxious all the time. I’m sorry. I’m trying, I’m trying.

Here, we are approaching the time of year when my hands bleed out of nowhere, when my back aches from slouching in the cold. The time when pulling myself out of bed in the morning drags trails of blood and damp leaves across the floor. When I can’t seem to open doors properly, even when I have the keys. But for now, this? Right now? This is my favorite time of year.

Things are hectic and panicked, the way I claim to like them. I’m performing twice in the next week and a half: at the Chi-Town Clown Revue at the Neo-Futurarium on Sunday, and as a part of the B-side performance series after the October 30th performance of Blood Wedding at Oracle Theater. Of course I’ve got a lot of work cut out for me before either of those things can happen. Not to mention getting my Halloween costume(s) ready, dang. And there are always events to attend.

As always, I’m always exhausted. In my dreams I’m always in a rush, and have longer hair, and when I’m awake I always seem to be late and pulling out my eyebrows and forgetting to shower. But damn, sometimes when I’m walking down the sidewalk, I could sprint with excitement.