oh, dignity can be so hard to maintain, and kindness, and honestly I’ve never liked the grateful dead, no, really, no, I do understand that drugs are fun, sure, but when you say Phil like you know him, I don’t sympathize, and anyway Box of Rain was the only one that ever did it for me, and that the memory of a cassette tape now living out its last in the back of a station wagon in Los Angeles… god help me, when I open my mouth– when a stranger, new or well-seasoned, leans in for the bear hug I don’t want I think
jesus, is this how I sound? or is it the Coors, is it the air out here? I think
oh, to have a moderately and tastefully lit room, a few good books, soft cushions and something stable to lean against, a minimal yet satisfying number of good beers, good cigarettes, vinyl playing quietly, to have you, to have the fear that I am not enough keep pace with your spirit and your intellect, rather than the fear that, if I spoke, no one would hear.
I am too tired, too drunk, too spent from childish boredom to have much to say. but I wish my little could rest on those dear shoulders. you all, my dear friends, have spoiled me for teeming others, for you, turning your cheek to mine, you look, you speak, you listen. and while the wind howls through the space between us, it knows itself, a conduit.
oh tumblr, baby, i’m so glad you’re back. i missed you. those hours in bed were not the same without you.
sorry for the lack of updates, my slacker self felt that my host website being down was a good excuse to do nothing.
what I have been doing: going through a wide variety of objects in my childhood bedroom while visiting my family for the weekend. there are some pictures here.
(tried to post this last night, but I think Tumblr was having some problems, so here goes.)
I am in my childhood bedroom, the red room of my parents’ house. I do not know how to fix this place, and so instead I will stuff my mouth with garlic, I will carry loads of paper from the closet to the door. To the patient down the stairs, what can I say that I have not already heard, and scoffed at? Dear child, what have we done. Are we so broken that no wholeness ever offered itself to you, ripe and joyous? The blood of this house has a biting tongue, despite the heavyweighted rope of its heart’s affections. I see all of us choking on the barbs, barbs of quick poison, of a critic’s easy hand.
I have been ill at ease lately, at most times and within and without most buildings, but here in this place a thousand habits turn their ugly heads and swallow me. I am often too lazy and too bitter to stave them off. But know, I do, I do, I do wish you kindness, all. There are many things my movements turn to by instinct–perhaps kindness is not one of these.
Losing vision on this, my adolescent bed. The last time it bore me you were here beside me, you, your shoreline eyes an anchor against memory, your warm hands on white cloth holding me to who I am, not who I was. But yet, but yet I idly dream I will clean these oily suitcases out, and my breath will filter all this ugly air.
There are times when I am very good at picking fights, at breaking things that were whole before I tried so hard to fix them. My hands start trembling so hard that to be near me is to gain a hairline fracture. I move along the line of dark-haired men that rule the houses of my fortune and I do my best to send them running: the angel in the library, the skeleton in the dark, the brother in my house, the brother in my father’s house– I go to them in tears and come out worse. I cloy and I cloy and I grate the bones of all their patience. To be a hysterical woman, yes, that of course is the worst sin against myself I could commit. Letters pouring from my lips like blood, if I could draw them back and burn them! But the one that I am when I am would not. There is always some more damage to be done.
“You’re a whore,” he said, in a dim basement. He said it again, a different man, in a smoke-filled apartment, windows blank unto the night. “A woman of nerves,” he said, as we sped through the desert. She was starting to bleed everywhere and she said “you, you only keep people around to justify your emotions,” and I said, “so do you.”
“Bigmouth strikes again,” she quoted, and it was true.
But please, at least give me this: I am a kinder woman now than on that night you made her pull her panties on and find her car keys and take you to my house, so you could lie to me about where you were and hold my shuddering body. I still can’t sleep most nights, but I am a kinder woman.
Mostly I just feel worn thin. I stare at my white hairs in the mirror and I think, if only the winter were not so cold. If only you were not so far away. If only I were instantly forgiven, if only I could choose what to forget. But oh, I am such a talented ruiner.
How many days until your small hand joins mine in the ship of my bed? The slow approaching coastline of my life calls out to you, the sound of the wind on the sea.
Going through my ever-present stacks of papers, I came across these thoughts regarding a Neo-Futurist piece I was working on in October 2009.
My coworker, Eli, just turned 34. Most of the time he works at a record store, but once a week we sell soup together. For years he made his living playing in a band with his two older brothers. It struck me as so strange, that someone more than twelve years older than me could be someone’s little brother. And some day my little brother will be 34, if nothing horrible happens. Eli laughs and says he was shocked to realize that he has lived longer than Jesus. This is something even little brothers can do. My brother will turn 34 in eighteen years, enough time for someone else’s baby brother to get old. I haven’t really been a part of his life since I was 18 years old. It’s strange, feeling so much love for someone who is basically a stranger. You have your cell phones in your pockets? Do you have brothers? Call them. Say hello.
Put a drink in my mouth and stop my heart. Put a fire in my hands and watch my eyes roll. These limbs are nothing but, these limbs are piling each other in the race to rapture. Ply my teeth with honey, unhook the bra straps of my aching jaw, let memory slip out of socket. You condemned your neighbor to a year of weekends, and watched his hair fall through his lips. But baby I look in those eyes and I hear a dial tone, and that sound fits better on my hip than any man’s voice I’ve heard yet, I know it.
These recent days are lived in fear for my faculties. Now, now I know that not only will, with time, my hearing’s fading, tinny with the sound of cricket’s wings, follow me to the end in dusty remembrances of a time when I thought I knew what it meant to hear a word, not only this, but my sanity’s ghost hovers over my shaking body to come. Because our blood is our blood, and our thoughts rise up from it like steam. Because I am sealed with you in this, the keening sound of our youth’s passing.
Reading in discomfort, aching, bottled up, I envy Rilke’s fervor. The voice of God is closed to me, and the voices of the angels, and yet– I still have the youthful dead, calling out to me across the water, the dumb joy of animals and the blushing of trees in the twilight.
The voice of God, he says, is nestled in the ear of my neighbor. The maple leaves of his word are rising up through the bathwaters of my brother’s house. And at night the unbeveled cross around your neck hits my chest softly, tossing the street light against my lashes. It pleases me to look upon, but no, I do not want it.
I am content to let the wind blow over my teeth, and let the gutter water run through my eyes.
Trying to understand why I have such trouble with meter.
I read Shakespeare like a conversation, and so I act it well, but the practice of scansion leaves me mortified. Sitting in room full of people who couldn’t tell you why Gertrude is a role worth playing, I look like an idiot. The lines I’ve written that were anything other than free verse have mostly been an accident, when I was writing with my tongue instead of my eyes.
Perhaps it’s the way I learned to read, or the way I speak– as soon as I start thinking it seems as though every syllable is stressed and I can’t handle it.
At a Lynda Barry lecture the other night, she mentioned that she never liked Emily Dickinson until much later, when she began memorizing those poems to the tunes of pop songs. Every day on the radio the meter seemed to fit.
I don’t know. Sometimes I think my poetic sensibility is a mess, and mediocre post-modernity is all I’m good for. If I cannot tell if a sonnet is even a sonnet, if I cannot master old forms, how can I explore new ones with good conscience? Sometimes I think these previous sentences are stupid, an excuse, a way of letting myself off the hook of my own need to put words close to other words to keep myself together.