all the hours spent in sleep at the wrong points: the mid-afternoons, the work-to-dos, the missed appointments and neglected friends. all the hours I should have spent sleeping that I spent instead in lamentation of nothing.

at some dark appointed hour the iron gate of my chest swings wide – the sensation is physical. from the center of my chest up through my teeth and pulled taut up into my brow across the eyes. the thing that in my head I keep calling “the keening” but it lacks that clarity of cause.

this little girl should put herself to bed, but has always been the type to prefer staying up all night, picking at her thoughts.

forcing her nodding head back up again and again to know just exactly how lonesome she can find the night. 

hold me, hold me. without fingers at the back of my neck my thoughts will roll away. 

more fragments from sorting through my studio papers:

god give good rest to all our misdirected saintings, give us sleep that does what it’s supposed to—not this restless acting out of dumb desires, of these titanic litanies of fear.

and what devil should I turn to when gods prove unkind? all this foolish talk a shorthand for the real desire

(brother, you know it, and all the boys I schoolyard chase with password guesses must know too):

to be the sharer of an esoteric knowledge, a reader-out of codes

to hold in your head the symbols others miss, and know their meaning, whispered in late-night treehouse voices. to know yourself a seeker and infiltrator, a caresser of truth hidden in the glut of life in all its details, falling on your body without pause. 

-

Oh, help, for I am a ceaseless reader of signs. Put all this serial attention to use before it kills me. All these messages grinding away on their silver wires, dangling before my twitching eyes. 

Let me slowly build a language, a tongue for this country I inhabit:

one the lips can shape while swollen, one that a drunk and lonely man can hold within his arms. Let this flood of words finally find its route. 

-

Perhaps I fold the lot of you into the vast poetic mannish shape of all those tragic lady poets, stuff my mouth with yearning words. Or I fit you each with wings to float above the Castle Duino. Or I plunge this hot and foolish lust to the bottom of the lake, and count my heart the bubbles rising up. 

-

Watch me quietly abandon my folly. Take a knife to tongue to spare the night air all this too-much speaking. What good language misdirected, lost? all my nurturing instinct led away from my collapsing house and brought instead to lay at the broken feet of pretty men that I would fuck to solace in my stead. Caregiver to all but those who hold its greatest claim. 

-

Give me, then, this pleated suffering–let me tangle all your aching limbs in my dark hair, grown back longer than the darkened hall. Abstracted desire stifling itself into the form of some arbitrary object: this is how I love a stranger, and so keep your secrets just like giving a gift. But still, I want to know what Furies follow you. Give you some spare night of safer harbor, to look the Kindly Ones in their dust-filled eyes and say yes, I know, for you follow me too, but please, just these few hours rest? Our cage-beaten hearts in brief proximity, the solace of a decoding ear and a soft tongue in your mouth. So much pain and mystery to speak of, but every word I write speaks “loneliness,” a keen into the adolescent dark. 

cleaning up my studio as we approach the semester’s end, sifting through all the scraps of paper I’ve been writing on the last several months. here are some fragments.

You took my hand and inscribed in it the notion: touch. Your tongue with which I taste.

I watched the darkness walk into you with certain step. The mare, the flame, the rippling pool. We work our foolish magics on the night. 

I am older now than you were then.

We quiet ourselves in soft absorption, the edge of Mina’s eyes before us, untethered. The dampened mats are cry repent, repent, belettered in mist.

Taped to the page, a piece of writing from years and years ago:

you said: I will wait,
I will sit and watch
but which tavern did you speak to?
you know I would stay with you,
a lamb at the edge of the tub,
gleaming

She bends her body into me and says, why don’t you come here anymore? Too tangled up in river weeds and rough men to remember where you come from? To take time for hot stew and soft company? Well, no matter. You can blow me off, but you can’t pick me out your bones.

Our Lady of the Fallen Star

your head, bowed. your eyes, clear. the world, the world.

the shape your eyes made in leaving. the embrace of a wall. the part of you that is always ever and ever without cease disintegrating. the word of acid and the word of blood. I could never, oh I could never–the unhinging of my thought’s jaw the record’s crack unveiling, your little sister a missionary of grace, your body a balloon in spring, the fields are then the field below. we climb the mound and the mound becomes us. the well, then, the well.

uncovering, we loosed our tongues among the matted reeds. our stray unfurling edges bent to please the aching of some distant path, and as our spinster bodies were undone we leapt, like light, from branch to branch, becoming and again the things the world had been to bolster us against.

we let our blood speak for itself.

and the words were like a flood that brought us under, the discovery of some new species living quietly within us, feeding on our terror, and our spit. 

take your long, curling thoughts, and douse me in them; the fire that crawls in will not crawl out. 

Moving through the ache of all this diaried time, all the yous of all my youthful romance, my heart turns back to look at itself down a long hall. 

I misquote myself from seven years ago and shift all my words around.

oh devil, I’ve missed you

you’d slipped from all my hungry sight

then there you were, in the grin to my left side

sliding back your sleet-wet hair with one hand.

you shuffled ice from off your shoulders

and bared your teeth in welcome.

for all the desperate phone calls of my life,

your name is the most hooked up to Thou

you who do not come when called

and when my heart breaks itself to open water,

the wolf grin blooms from your jaw.

you, unlike the others, always seemed to know that I was bluffing weak,

that there should be no tolerance for all this wringing of hands, all these averted eyes.

One day I will spit the last of fear from my mouth, so I may glut myself on sun and sweet warm night. 

I’ve been digging through my archives again.

The following is a diary entry from January 8th, 2007. I was 19 years old. 

This weekend, I told someone that I want to spend the rest of my life with him, that I want to bear his children, to wait until he gets home from work at all hours of the night, to see just how much he looks like his father thirty years from now. That I would leave school and move to some new city, that I would work, that I would stay at home, that I would do whatever love asked. But love did not ask. Love, in fact, would rather I did not. And love isn’t so much love as novelty, some memories, a skilled body and a few clever words. And yet I was once the knife that split apart his chest, left him with the breeze from the window in his veins. Perhaps again. Perhaps.

There is a church, abandoned, on the street where I live. I have mentioned it before; it haunts me. On one side, cut stone words pronounce:

DIVINE LOVE ALWAYS HAS MET AND ALWAYS WILL MEET EVERY HUMAN NEED.

On the other, ivy had covered the words, rendered them unreadable. I showed him, turned his crater lake eyes on the leaves, and we said, one day, one night, we would tear the ivy down and see.

The winter has killed the ivy. A strange cross-hatching of dead twigs is all that remains. And today, alone, I stared. I stared until the words were clear through the remnants.

COME UNTO ME ALL THAT LABOR AND ARE HEAVY LADEN– I WILL GIVE YOU REST.

I stood a moment longer with the mud and the graffitti and the broken glass, and as I walked away I called him and gave him my dead twig translation. But he was not there. I had his voice, but not his hand.

Independence is so very disappointing.

Today, now, I remember standing at the ivy, and not the conversation with the man. The church, I believe, still stands, but I have not gone to see it in many years, although the whim has struck me. The man I have not seen in many years, and in a good deal of those years the whim has not struck me. I have caught myself a goodly number of other foolish idols since. I have rent my heart on other wooden porches, made a few more men sick with misheard words.

Times and names and blinking eyes are ever-changing; longing remains the same. 

remembering, vividly, the dreams I had about you seven years ago, and the lust of eight and the poems of two, your vivid eyes and wicked grin filling in the devils of each tale I wrote before I found my footing–

no matter what time or I may do, some people’s names are simply etched inside your bones, their hearts too much of what you grew around to be plucked out of the person you’ve become.

I hope you understand. I cannot imagine you do not. 

turn your fingers into the night. pull.

hook the long, stringy hairs of all your darkest thoughts through each other, try to make something like a scarf, or a carpet, or something that might have some use.

look at the matted thing you hold in your hands; discard it. 

consider all the things around you that you consider “yours” or perhaps “you” [mine, me]; imagine how fragile the boundary that keeps each thing from being any other thing. 

notice the arbitrary way in which I have called some pieces of dirt “my body,” and others “my words,” and also how I have claimed some others as not-of-myself, as of the world, in some way that implied that I was not another collection of scraps in what that world contained.

this is a language of convenience. 

I disintegrate into all neighboring surfaces. 

My mouth, my hands, my cunt, my thoughts–these are are all also small black beetles, shafts of light, a muddied rock, a patch of night sky.

here, do not cry, not because you are not sad, but because you are all things, because you are no things. forget all the languages the world taught you with its racking pains. speak only softly into the night, with sounds the night understands. 

[ shit is pretty dark right now. ]

I wonder, how many times can you say: I wrote this song instead of killing myself, before it loses its luster? Before the postponement is ineffective, the audience insulted? Here, in the face of this excruciating pain, I was only a little unkind to a small number of people? I tell myself this impresses no one. 

This running-myself-into-the-ground, this why-isn’t-this-better, this i-am-ashamed-of-producing-anything-that-is-not-perfect and thus i-am-ashamed-of-producing-anything, it is, at the dark times like these, tangled up in the knowledge that every thing I am doing is, as it is happening, the thing I am doing instead of giving up. the sickest part of my brain gives me her litany: this is what you’re forcing yourself to keep on going for? this? to show someone the scraps of some half-started project? to write some crap essay? to be unkind, needy, and neglectful of the people you love? you tolerate what it is like inside your head in order to be simply mediocre? 

That, she says, is embarrassing. 

Allowing every single action to oscillate between the fuck it all of catatonia and the impossible pressure of this is what I’m staying alive for, so it had better be remarkable, this is not a way to accomplish tasks. this is not a way to get things done. this is not a way to live.

look. today you woke up. you took a shower. you put on clean clothes. you left the house, only an hour after you said you would. you drank coffee. you ate food. you overpaid for both those things, but now’s not the time to beat yourself up about that. you worked on a project. you averted a crisis; others arose. they always will. you didn’t throw yourself off a bridge into highway traffic or the dark waters of the Chicago River. 

you imagine a world where you can drink shandies forever but never get too drunk, and all you have to do is stand in a spotlight in an uncrowded bar, singing Roy Orbison songs into a microphone, all your friends smiling at you from the booths. 

you hang on, because that’s all you can do, forever and ever and ever. 

notes from this long late winter:

The great something to be said for the presence of hands, the letting out of blood, the weighing of voices, dried, the ever inlet of the body, the night.

Their eyes wet like late-night small-town duck ponds, smoke curling upwards, bodies pulsing in quieted machines, all bathed in grocery store moonlight.

-

Let us speak in the bodies of code: one listing sigh, two pulsing wrists, one blossoming eye. 

Let us speak in the rhythms of time– your breath, my ballooning ribcage, faltering and stiff, the membranes of my thoughts of you that cover me.

Slowly tease the teeth from my mouth, play oracle, be kind and deft and murderous in your dispensation of truth.

-

All my letter-writing could not do what your canine tooth accomplished in one aching moment.

-

Let your long blond hair wrap itself around my teeth, shake the sugar castles in our midst with all our quaking limbs. Turn to me on the end of a bridge and say, “Look, the life that we once clung to, slowly slugging its way downstream. And here, we, above the river, gleaming, are.”

-

I held all her steaming sentiment inside my mouth, the wolf I kept there keening. The littlest of girl smiles like a hunter’s horn. I am drooling for a bloodletting, and so the words seep from out my lips, and I don’t know about the changing of the guard but I know a high wall I could throw you over.

scrap thoughts

I am still here in the belly of the beast:

the sour wine of every ocean’s discard slopping round my banks

the distant call of some strange nation’s fog horn lights.

my teeth grow ever crooked more and I can’t walk these heaving halls without the picture of you in my head

you in the general sense, I guess

making a scattered quiet nest of all the plucked out brow hairs and letters unresponded, perhaps I will sleep easy when all obligations are–not completed but discarded, like a witness name escaped.

imagine here a large white bed of feather down and pleasing textures, a tan prince body in mid-morning sun, steaming cups of tea and dedicated pleasures

I am forever running myself into the ground because I belong in the dirt

perhaps all this is a clever excuse for my disposition, mournful and antic in turns (the hamlet that i was gave no warning to the ophelia i also was)

what music this then that seethes and rages in all my blood

and I am always so cold, and the night too quiet, when I am trying, alone, to sleep.