suspended

there's nothing like owing a large amount of money suddenly and a blistering 90-degree day to make you think of faking your own death. really i just want to get out of here. i'm all right with living, it's life that's the problem. 

really i just want to get in my car and drive up the coast with tom waits blaring and the salt wind blowing, drive until there's no coast left, until there's no gas left and no cash left and it's just me at the edge. stumbling on beneath the redwoods. screaming into the sea. and so on. 


always sounds more romantic than it would be. 


but which is the more cowardly thing to do, to stay here half naked and sweating amongst the bright lights of this shadowless city, or to run? whichever it is i'll be doing that. 


pass the wine please. no i'm not giving it back. and get your own cigarettes, i'll be needing all of mine. and do please start talking. i've had enough silence for a while. 

there is the purring, at least

home to shower. first time in days. i can smell it on me. the cats have destroyed everything, knocked the roses over, the rose water into the litter box, as if they themselves had made the Great Flood. how presumptuous. she said to me black eyeliner brings out the black in your hair and i have been wearing it since. leaving traces on pillows in the beds i sleep in, black flutters pressed into the cotton. can you read the torments in my dreams? 

like Rogue but my hair's turned black instead, black for every dream i can't breathe i'm smothered i can't fight i'm trapped. it's not the cat's fault she sleeps on my chest. it's the same black dreams any way.

all of it, and none

everything has no meaning and too much meaning all at once. frequencies cancel each other out and all i hear is a low melancholy hum in this saturating heat. i am in somebody's car chain-smoking in the back because that's all i do these days instead of the other. did i say i've become a ghost? how then, so visible?

you're staring, don't you know. don't assume my eye contact in the rearview has meaning. Old Man and the Sea was about fishing, after all. but something more too. and that's what you're looking for. you won't find it here. my face has been saying you don't know me, you never will since i first learned to wear it. 

i suddenly become very interested in a hangnail on my right index finger or maybe in the cars rushing past, their breeze whipping my hair. still smoking, and smoking. you say it's like i'm grieving. i say nothing. maybe i am. how many lives have i lost, living just this one? i want hair that looks best at its worst and hands that touch things in a certain way and meaning to solidify and condense so i am not so terrified all the time. 

i have that urge to run again. too many know too much. surreal cities breed existential thoughts. my tights are in tatters, i'm all used up. 

but hey, i won't run. where else is there to go? i'll stay and learn to expand space and create distance out of nothing, out of silence. how many senses fall into atrophy while we look and look and run our mouths? i would like to hear in your silences what you are really saying and leave you not knowing i know it. another secret you won't take. 

leave it all take nothing, but there's always something left

here's wishing i hadn't been born. 

here's wishing memory wasn't a slippery little fish with spines that poke and draw blood and a hook in too deep to pull out without ripping off the jaw. 


i am laying here gasping drowning in the air, ribs heaving gills useless and the dead weight of fourteen atmospheres pressing down. 


i've been reading books about memory, Kundera, Primo Levi, books to slow time, books to vanish into. i'll live in your world please. preferable to this half-life, this gravitas, buried here beneath stones.