Sid Branca - It’s Too Late (Buddy Holly cover)

Some of you know this, but I get weirdly emotional about Buddy Holly sometimes. Yesterday was the 53rd anniversary of “the Day the Music Died”, and I recorded this little thing. Please note that I don’t actually play piano at all, so struggling my way through three chords is an accomplishment. (And not even all the real chords from the original, I went in a more minor direction.) 

Anyway, in case anyone was wondering what my singing voice sometimes sounds like, now you know.

This is my life these days, all shooting video footage and fighting with a  broken sink, barely any time to breathe between them. I’m a busy girl lately, even more so than usual. Things are a little nuts, but in mostly good ways. I’m working on an insane number of artistic projects, and life projects, and all sorts of stuff is going on. If you catch me in passing running between one thing and another, maybe we can chat and catch up.

She walks like a woman afraid, her skin is pale and mottled with scars and her eyes are down except when they are up and angry and they are always angry. My name in her mouth is just one more step in a litany, to give me grace is to forgive them all and what have we done to her, or, good lord, what haven’t we? We have lured the stitches up from her arms, we have leaned in close and felt her hair on her cheek. How cruel I was, to fall in love with the image of myself in negative. 

Scattered thoughts, and at a great distance. Guilt is a ribbon, and you are a bow.

Two thousand, eight hundred

You wake up with your pockets full of dirt, 

smelling like oil and without your keys. 

You have hands that shake and knuckles that scab, 

four dead languages under your tongue, 

a broken bottle in your flower bed.

We pace the streets for the thing you lost, 

our backs stiff from the yellow floor. 

My bottom lip is fat and my voice is all yours,

six strands of hair caught on your neck.

Can you keep a secret?

So can I.

Come back before this winter ends

and tie me to this bed.

This city isn’t mine but its skyline feels like home

and the little girl at the water fountain

seems somehow like a sign.

I’m still keeping buttons for bass notes

and selling everything I own.

Tie a ribbon round your finger, baby,

it’ll be a long day yet.

It’s tragic (or maybe a vast relief?) that Nabokov didn’t live to see this happen, the sublimated obsession with necrophilia in the romances of popular culture clawing its way up to the surface. This isn’t new for the horror genre (see the Japanese zombie film Stacy, for example, in which adolescent girls become zombies because they really just need love–the love of necrophiliac middle-aged men), but this is a new level. The blogs are going to have a field day with this. I clearly have some reading to do. Maybe one day I will try and do some writing on why a large segment of popular horror film seems to have missed feminism? In short: GROSS GROSS GROSS, but I will probably watch it out of morbid curiosity.

Bright Eyes - Blue Christmas (off Maybe This Christmas)

Sometimes you miss a person, and that’s hard and complicated. Sometimes, too, it’s December, and that’s complicated and hard too. But hey, the New Year’s comin’ soon.

I am looking at this photo while listening to Mariah Carey’s version of this song, alone in my kitchen in my pajamas making generic Chef Boyardee. Happy Christmas Eve, everyone.

(I came across a poem I’d written for French class years ago, thought I’d give the English version another whirl. not really feelin’ it, but maybe there’s something salvageable in here.)

She said: 

             write me a poem about a fountain

That means nothing, I said, and besides

            So? she said

Besides it’s already been done

She was silent

The sun glinted on her necklace and I was blind

The sun glinted on her necklace
more than it glinted on the fountain

Her fingers brushed against the gold of it
and whole worlds collapsed, were shifted and rebuilt

She laughed at my quiet– caught staring
I looked at the ground, then back

And slowly it dawned on me;
she was the gem at the end of the chain

Historicism

I heave myself through time’s maw. I hail myself a master of the present. I breathe. 

We are looking at a roadside photograph. Laughing at the other man’s discomfort, he looks at the photo and then at the floor, then says, “Well, every step you’ve ever taken, something has been lost there.” 

We are running out of new ground. 

I try to turn and look with my left eye, but history presses on me like a witch trial. I stare at the side of the refrigerator and everything collapses. The boys and men you once were crowd into my pantry, sharing the same blue eyes and the same strange name, but yelling different words and mulling different silences and I am falling apart. Who am I to herd these crowds? Someone else comes home, and another hoard arrives.

My backyard is filled with the bodies of the women that I used to be. I have forgotten my past with a shovel and a bath. But yours, yours I carry with me like a child. I have lost the way of hearing just your voice. Only your mouth on my ear, your hand on my hair. That was then, this is now. 

If love is the history of love, then where is the palimpsest where we can write our names? 

I beg your pardon; I forget myself. Dress yourself in different clothes, paint your eyes and change your songs. Kiss me like a stranger, and the past is gone. But each word from your lips speaks with a voice that is older than these new-found tunes, and I am afraid. 

The hand that feeds my heart has struck the hour, and time is cruel to each and all. So let me, let me learn how to forget.

"the big guy with the owl tattoos and shit-eating grin"

This balmy December had me fooled; the winter distant, grief a memory. This morning’s snow, the pines in the streets, my friends all taking flight–

His bright blue eyes are on the sidewalk, filling up with tears. We keep walking, we keep walking and I am almost falling to the ground with every step. But why, but why, but why, but why–

You and I are kicking cans out of the car. We are sitting on the sidewalk, hitting our hi-tops at the ankles. We drink a handle of Jim Beam, you fall asleep and I puke blood. I am too afraid to touch your hand when jumping off the railing. 

Strange to think, I am older now than you were then. 

I took off my gloves. I wrote your name in the snow. Someone stomped it out. They were right, but so was I.

The night of my hesitation proved the end of all my chances. Your name in my unsent missives, a hot coal. I packed my grief and fled the country, but found you in the eyes of Russian saints. The rain of Paris streets spelled out the movement of your arms. There is no escaping loss. Grief is a bloodied hound. I am a fool, a fool.

The critic at my shoulder sinks her teeth into my neck. Who do you think you are? Who do you think you are? A whore cut short by mourning. A child, a child who misses someone who could have been her friend. 

Every letter that I type shrinks smaller. A black and white photo, you are three times my size and never changing. So stupid, so stupid, so stupid, how could we–

I send messages to your inactive address. Four years… has it really been so long? The start of a long winter. But I am still here. And I remember you, and I remember you, the tiny pieces that I hold.

A dead man’s clock is hanging on my wall, and there is a shape of an owl in my heart.