it is about 90 degrees. at about midnight. my eyeliner is melting everywhere and I can’t seem to move around properly. at least strangers on the train can’t tell the sweat from the tears.
Our rapid, labored migrations from couch to bed. I say, “my god, the time,” you say, “my god, you are so small, I had forgotten” I say how could I have cut a limb off of my life but still be walking? I am some drunkard citizen of an unknown star.
I stand in a suburban bathroom with a shard of metal. A small girl vomits in a stall. I think– how did it come to this? To karaoke, to missed appointments, to small-town fears. I don’t—
There are men who are kind, I assure myself. I am a broken music box. I am a miscast fool. I am a wasted block of time. I am the fear of a wasted block of time.
Entire past nights of my life curl in on themselves, poisonous, birdlike, scratching at my shoulders I would like this screeching to be over. Each word in either direction seems to turn daggerous after mere moments. Arthur, realizing his has been deceived, that these words came not from his queen’s mouth, despite the resemblance.
I see three bridges before me. I would like to burn only one, but do not know how to control the fire. Seal your lips for ninety days, then open your mouth as a friend’s, not a lover’s. I can only have you as a brother when I have had the time to kill the ghost of you in my bed. The sequence of numbers that means the sound of your voice calls it back again to haunt me every night. Let this exorcism continue, so I may one day stand beside you, secular and strong and self-contained.
my nerves are frayed, my mother keeps on sending telegrams, hopeful but reminders of things I can’t think about, and I just want a drink, when lightning hits the cemetery across the street, the wind roars, hail starts crashing into all the windows despite the heat–
I watch from my bedroom window with each flash of lightning, to make sure the dead are not rising from their graves, because tonight of all nights it feels likely.
Eyeglasses belonging to prisoners at the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp.
this picture stopped me dead, and now i feel so cold…
just… oh. oh. oh no. I wish this image weren’t so beautiful. oh, I am upset. it makes me think of how one of the most effective devices in With The Needle That Sings In Her Heart was the pile of shoes on stage. Something about the reduction of a person to an object rendering them incapable of human-object relations…. if atrocity treats a person like an object, someone into something, a thing cannot possess another thing in the same way, and so the discarded pile of their once-personal possessions reads like the pulled-off skin of their personhood. Forgive the incoherence of this ramble– I’m working on a play right now for which I’m doing a series of interviews with people about their relationship to objects in their lives, and I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately.
as my old hardcore canadian bike club president roommate used to say, stay posi.
Just when I am smearing myself with the bottom of the well, just when I am slamming my temples against the desk of all my foolish labors, just when I am tearing out my hair in fury and in fear, you. You walk through my office door from a thousand miles away and the sight of you is such a salve that I fear that I am finally just seeing things. You tell me your permanent return is once again delayed, but the shock of seeing you is too warm for me to mind. So, there you are. The world exists outside my current terror. The trajectory of my heart’s foolish dramas extends backwards on for years. It will continue on, piercing into the soft flesh of the future. Men with deep blue eyes and menacing smiles are a pack of wolves that have torn me apart, are the sea that keeps me moving, are the wind inside my mouth. They have torn me apart, and they will tear me again, and I may go and return and again, but they and I are always.
there are measures we can take. there are steps, procedures to put in place, ways in which I can learn when to bite and when not to bite my tongue, when to walk away and when to assure you that I’m coming back. more essential: there are ways in which you can admit that parts of you are broken, that parts of you are breaking me. because while I may chose to stay, while I do love you, this responsibility is not mine, and cannot be, because the choice to pursue change is yours. I am reaching for a drowning man, and his fingers are going not for my arms but for my eyes. his words cry help, but then cry murder, and then convince me so seductively that it is water that our lungs are aching for, not air.
A little girl learns that sometimes when her father is angry, he will yell and yell, make himself hoarse with names and swears, kick and throw things at the walls but never at her, but if she waits until he is done, goes quietly up to her room to cry, and waits, he will come up those steep stairs, remorseful, every time. I’m so sorry. He will grovel, and the peace will be made, as long as the temporary storm is weathered. His anger grows less frightening with time, not more. But then, sometimes, a woman still pretends to be a child, but this man is not her father nor does he act the same. She loves him in a different way and he rages in a different way and now when she sits there and listens, until it’s time to cry and wait for the apology, she feels as though she’s doing something wrong.
found on the street in Chicago
TO: Kristen C
HAPPY HOLIDAYS!
You still never call me, I cry. But I still love you. My lady your gorgous. ***-3084, I will be waiting. We have to chill naked with zebra’s. P.S Nice Ass, I Love it, I mean U.
FROM: Alex F
in case you were wondering what I do with my time.
(shooting the trailer for For Profit)
in a Western Massachusetts barn, we are on the see-saw. try so hard to keep still, keep still. we just want that good flat line, that peaceful bit. we are screaming. the music is loud, i don’t remember. i remember her face, streaked with sweat, like mine, like mine. under the white gauze, under the hot sun, i am fainting. the realization crowns; we have set ourselves an impossible task. we are being difficult to be difficult, but we don’t know how to stop. we are yelling into the wood, we are yelling into our bodies to be mastered–please, please, let the physics of this world simply yield to my demands. my temples burn. i have shorn off all my hair. my skin is burned. my shoes are torn. we have done this to ourselves for our own good. i want to return, i want to flee. the ache in my feet from those barefoot woods was better than this echoing chest. two half-filled balloons try desperately to balance. the beam does not know mercy, an object can only be honest and so i fill my room with things. i climb inside my seat, i climb inside my life again to learn i am betrayed–no matter, no matter. i spend six years on a bus across town; i see you and i nod. we are trying so hard to be still, because someone we thought—
the struggle to stay cogent remains throughout all seasons. spring slowly bleeds to birth itself, and my stupid head is caught in winter. the night life of my small mistakes crowds around my bed, a hoard. the horses pound the earth. i bend. i keep my woman’s back curved in supplication to my doubt, i keep my child’s teeth yellow like the day. in a half-dream my mother turns to me, sobbing, and I have nothing to say.
you can stop, he says. just stop, he says. you can walk away. walk away, walk away. my legs have fallen off with every lash i pulled. i wander the cosmetics isle, hoping to– nothing to be said, I said. nothing to be said. once I start I won’t be able to stop, I said. once the dam breaks the river knows that it can win. and who are we to try.