reverie

you see, she is stealing all my time, or am i giving it to her? gladly. my heart is on fire and it renders me clumsy and inarticulate. broke my thumb in the car door last week, you can imagine how it is to type, compensating for the space bar with whichever finger is convenient. i don't mind. if only my words would come out with grace, if only i did not have to tell her through my fingers on her skin, in her hair, small kisses in the night, how my chest will burst with this madness that some i suppose call happiness, this strange foreign state i cannot bring myself to believe in.

an inverted world in which sadness is comfort and happiness the unattainable challenge, the unknown fear. well, i'll be the warrior here, the conquerer. fuck cowardice. truth is, she's just as scared as i am, just as inarticulate, and oh how just as brave.


my hair is honey blonde and red now, have i mentioned that yet? a friend said today i was glowing, she said at first she thought it was my hair and hot pink sunglasses but no indeed, i am bursting forth from inside, luminescent. you caused that, love. phosphorescent fungi in the pitch dark, readmitting radiation slowly over time, bright enough to light a path long hours into the night, for days, for weeks, for years. 

i see color again in the world and pick her bouquets of aged flowers, it's never enough, i don't know what to do with all this joy and you know, i'm afraid of it, i'm awkward when it comes to love, i'm afraid to let the fuck go because isn't this somebody else's life i'm supposed to be living?  and what we do in the in-between times when it's just the two of us, is that really for me alone? i find i close my eyes and look away, she shines too brightly and i'm afraid to see this for what it is, that is to say, those words not-yet-to-be-said but which clog my throat and hitch my breath. yes, and i'm falling.

i'm trying not to over-think things, i'm trying to let go. i've passed the point of running now, you're worth it, love, you're worth it ten thousand times over, if only i could tell you so

intensity

a picnic on the beach, blue cheese-stuffed figs wrapped in bacon and a bottle of wine and i'll kiss her in public and i don't care, and all i can think lying curled up with her nights is this is too good to be true, i don't deserve this, she's going to find out what a wreck i am and back away and break my glass heart.

red wine and chain-smoking i say too much or i say not enough; never the right things, anyway. i can't explain to her how my chest is imploding because it's too complicated, how i'm trying to stay present, i'm trying to ignore myself, i'm trying not to tell lies and i'm shit-scared here because happiness is not what i know 


but all i want is to trust 


and she's worth it and oh fuck am i scared

if a beginning is even discernible in the midst of irrelevant events

afternoon sun on the back of my neck, you sit with me while i drink my tea and smoke and then walk me to the corner, you didn't have to, we both know that. i insist you make blueberry muffins and tell you i'll come tomorrow, i swear this time i will. 


we're playing games, aren't we, waltzing around each other in this in-between space where i don't know you and you don't know me yet but there's something charged here. i'll keep the secrets buried and maybe they'll dissipate on their own. i'd forgotten how it was to laugh like this, how my skin sheds, how light i am underneath.

 you can't break my heart because for now i'm just dreaming. in my head it's lovely, the fast-footed dance so captivatingly sweet, when there are still ten thousand outcomes, still elbow room in the world, when possibility is more potent than desire. 


i'll see you tomorrow, i suppose. i won't sleep tonight but i'll never tell you so. 

trying to catch the horses

the earth spins so fast with so many sounds of freeways and fire and ice cream trucks and i can't keep up, the long-lost brief smells of horses and leather and hay. i can't keep up, i'm exhausted, i can't catch hold, or is it me who is skipping about too quickly to keep pace with?


i'm in a time-muddle. i feel afire. 

but aren't they lovely, these early sunny summer days?

Trying to Catch the Horses

When I give up and turn my attention

to the purr of the grass, the clatter of the aspen,

the clouds lifting off Mt. Teewinot,

I become a curious god, a tar baby,

a clump of grass they must graze. 

I reach up and touch the blue with my fingers,

not just the air above my head,

but the sky itself as far as it goes. 

-Dan Gerber

must we have to try so hard to not be dissatisfied with everything?

You need not leave your room, remain sitting at your table and listen. You need not even listen, simply wait, just learn to become quiet, and still, and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked. It has no choice; it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
(from grey)

in the interim, shall i watch fellini films, listen to bowie, grow antique roses on the windowsills?




is it so hard to imagine sitting so still, stilling the mind, the body, stilling the heart? what terror is there in this attention to time that we spend so long evading?

new task

my lips are eroding with how much i haven't said. coy smiles and downturned eyes are all that's needed these days, an opportune blush, a placid face, a complacency with awkward silences. nobody cares much for anything beyond themselves. i dreamt last night my fists spoke for me.  if only words could bring forth such blood.


i'm rapidly losing faith in confidentiality, those things i've said blown open over and over in the past week. what need have i for words, anyway?

i'm fifteen years old again, they're taking everything from me, they're reading everything, i've no space left.


i'm trying to burn a hole in my stomach. a secret cavity, sore to the touch. i'll hide secrets in there, they'll cut me up and they'll never know because i'll never tell, innocuous grapefruit juice top shelf in the fridge--oh yes, this is a vice they can't spurn me for. i'll be the rogue but i won't be the child, i'll cheat, oh yes, i've always been a cheat, a liar, a fraud-daughter, too many pejorative adjectives affixed to my name. don't think i can't wield those too.

intermittency

waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting. 

trying to determine who i am without the rebellion.




deny me all you want but i stand by my lies, they're all i've got

tell me again about unconditional love

my brain goes off half-cocked and freezes there. i learn things every day and all they do is clog my synapses. i see white everywhere i go, black static at the edges, the swoop of motion, the rattle of keys. i'm trapped in this room because i cannot face the outside world.


you've always been a country girl, she says, maybe your anxieties are from that city. but then: until you find God again you'll be out of kilter, so i'm not taking anything too seriously. i give her back one of her awkward silences, a debt it'll take more than my lifetime to repay. 

i'm about to be caught in my lies, the biggest ones. waiting on the cusp, it's sunday, no mail, no phone calls, just waiting. cigarettes taste like ash in my mouth, hot and dry. thank you now you've ruined this too. 


truth is, i'll never be you

i'm wearied now of owning my own heart

yes, i offered to pick her up from jail this morning because i have a need to prove i'm not useless because i am a good friend. i have no intention of getting in the middle, she's all yours, my dear, you know she's not my type. don't mistake my awkwardness for disappointment; i am merely trying to memorize the feeling of being valued. of course you need to rush in and save her, of course i'll go back to doing whatever it is i wasn't doing before.

but hey, i'm good in a crisis, i'm good at 3am when you're stranded drunk at a gas station in pasadena in your short black dress and heels, where the cops left you after they cuffed your girlfriend, ma'am, is there someone you can call? yes, of course there is, i'm good, i'm here, i'll talk you through it, i'll save you until she's free again and you can rush in, the heroine. 


really, it's just the coincidence of sobriety and reliability. i'll never be the loose cannon, the rogue, the one asking to be saved. vicarious drama is, in the end, only a surrogate, and i'm excruciatingly bored. 

salinger

how can one person feel so much at one time, and feel nothing? i am not in my body just now. dissociated, they tell me. fancy word for momentary brain-deadness, for separation of mind from body or mind from itself. 


it's terribly peaceful and i'm quite frightened. 

i'm wearing that placid face, i can't feel my legs, i want a cigarette but the thought of leaving the house, of existing in the outside world is making me tremble. cocktails of pills are all that's keeping me conscious through these blurring endless days. 


i'm turning into a ghost. i'm excruciatingly bored and what a waste, what a waste, i'm slipping out of sight, out of mind, out of hand. 

hero complex

my dear, is it you who are distancing us or just the semi-gloss of making up with the girl we both know is pulling you down? you can't save her. no one can. i can't save myself either but the difference is i don't let you try. 

not-feeling is a lost art. i have become too triangulated in your relationship, the third party, the convenient one. 


i'd tell you this if you fed me red wine by the bottle, asked me about my sudden retreat. but i'd like to think i'm in the right in my silence, that truth is too rash and acknowledging my existence as such too fanciful.

susurration

i never said yes, i just didn't say anything at all. you didn't ask and i pulled down my sleeve in what i would call a surreptitious gesture. silence speaks for us and that's all that's in my head just now. don't interrupt. it's hot out already, it's still morning, the smoke stalls in a cloud around my face. blocking the sun, i guess. i feel poisoned. 


everything ends up too repetitive after a while, you know? 

you're here but i'm not. not really. my apologies. 

when the rose sun sets over the hollywood hills

and a quiet in my head in direct contradiction with the city, everything embossed with meaning and placement in space, that car to my left, red light means stop as in stop the car not cease all physical movement, my fingers growing tired of holding this cigarette, the bones and muscles working just so for just so long, repetitive movements through space are nearly but not always predictable.


and a warm nostalgia for things having been, the lost circumference of one's thighs, a whole absorption in this one book at this one time in which this particular writer's words spill out of you later on, ingested and chemically altered to become your own, a loss of friends, a loss of joy, a loss of complacency with lazy sunday afternoons.

but still glimpses, yes! early-afternoon brunch, a swept floor, the coolness of indoors and a curtained soft white sun, casual cigarettes and the right book, the right voices wafting in through the screens and it's ok because, you see? fleeting remembrance has so much more depth and the twilight still holds the echoes of the fire of the setting sun, ten minutes past. 

vacuum

ages in the sinkhole. if only i were not mired in something so basic as the human condition.


i just feel so terribly ordinary, you know?

la la land

the meterologists here are great at telling us what the weather is, not what it will be. they lie again and again and i am forced to strip off jackets, sweaters, knee boots in a sudden midday sun. you think they'd learn but this is a city of denial.


the future tense is impossible to comprehend without hope in the equation. that's all we're built on, west of the san andreas. without it we'll slide off into the sea. good riddance. no one would miss us.


they'd miss the movies, though.

partial suicide

let's pretend it was the tequila, a bad reaction to tequila that made me vomit all over my boots for hours, reduced my limbs to dead weight. i don't remember blacking out, but who does? just hands, being carried, the irresistible pull of gravity on my body, the inability to do anything but be swept along. yes, the tequila. 


slumped over my roommate's arm i looked Death in the face and said, all right, i'm ready. 


it was terribly peaceful. 

woke in the morning, surprised that i had. can't shake the disappointment. there was a beautiful finality about the whole evening. 

three days i've been in a daze: what next?

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. 

into the woods, the wolf's belly

supposing i sit very very still, supposing i do not look nor think nor remember, is it possible to achieve invisibility? or cease to exist, which is more or less the same thing?

we who were made ghosts before we understood what it was to be human want so badly to slip into the grainy stills of black and white until we look the way we feel, until we feel nothing at all, and thereby somehow prove we are something. 

don't you see? we are heartbreaking. 

and still i am negating myself and i cannot not, despite my fading color, the slipshod patchwork of my brain, my dead pale eyes that say we know this story already, we know the end but tell it all the same, let's live it through again

retreat

the one called lazarus, rogue, et: where do you go when the silence takes hold?

on those days i am too ashamed to leave any imprint on the world. 

probably i'm still drunk

because i was two hours ago and we seem to be going round or possibly making this habit or of course maybe it's that the only way to travel, the only way to get myself on that plane and go willingly more or less into the nexus of my distress is to be hungover and eating hash browns. 


because there is nothing like being horrifically drunk on jameson and ginger soda with friends you can be an asshole with and who will put you to bed so you can get a two-hour nap before driving in the rain to the airport, and my god, everywhere i go these days i am afraid i will see someone i know. this town is getting too small for the both of us, you know. in my head we agreed to me on the east side and you the west but i don't trust you that much, i just can't, you've got all that fame and fortune now and has it gotten into your brain yet, have you become what you hate? or maybe i am seeing shadows from a past life, shadows of the dead, my own dead face mirrored back at me in the glare of the sun, in these long dawn shadows that make my step unsteady and half-dead. 

well. it's eight days starting now. i have the appropriate pills and aloofness, i have the appropriate excuses. i am properly coldhearted. 

when i do not stop talking it's because i'm afraid of all that you know

do not tell me i have a body. i am trying to maintain the illusion.

shall we just pretend, then? ignore my anger and my spiteful jabbing words, shall we pretend i had too much sugar or pills or caffeine or what have you, ignore my disjointedness? it's what we're best at, you know. you and your booze, the way you see right through me, all our west coast secrets illuminated by this harsh southern sun. i won't tell if you won't tell but you know i have more to lose.


i am full of lies and half-truths that tumble out together because i cannot bear that quiet look you give me across the table. you know it but it's the only way i can keep you guessing. shall we never admit that we live in different realms though we were born kin? almost-brother and yet i was raised in a house of secrecy that even you cannot penetrate.


at least you can look at me and feel all right with your mild malaise. i am useful for comparisons. i am useful in being the one worse off, the rogue, the hopeless one. and there is that, i guess.

the malady of disconnexion, of quavering eyes and a mixed-up brain

"You go on looking. Her face 

is given over to sleep, it's silent, 

asleep, like her hands. But all 

the time the spirit shows 

through the surface of the body, 

all over, so that each part bears 

witness in itself to the whole - 

the hands and the eyes, the curve 

of the belly and the face, the 

breasts and the sex, the legs and 

the arms, the breath, the heart, 

the temples, the temples and 

time. "  -The Malady of Death, Marguerite Duras

i'm tired

of the effort required to exist. lying back on the grass in the sunlight all i feel is the universe pressing, compacting my atoms until i am reduced to negative space. 

these endless slippery days

trying to continue to exist or to not exist, alternately and in alarmingly quick succession. 

isn't that what we're all trying to do in the end?

shall i light my insides afire and smoke the devil out? or let him gnaw so quietly on the bile in my gut?

if only my carapace would contain me. shall i drift away then, leave only raw cavity shrouded in dark? there are no lights inside. if we barricade the entrances, seal the exits. retreat softly to the interior, the caves of the deep. will we be safe then. will we.

iggy with his big soft eyes looks at me and wags his tail. he is horse-sized and gentle but can bowl me over with one excited chestnut leap. walking him in the gloaming with fireflies and sweet grass smells and my heart surges with a foreignness i could only call hope. in shame i am relieved when it passes and my steps trudge again.

i need space inside my shell. how do i explain? like furniture with empty drawers, like clear tables, bookshelves stacked one deep. space to turn around in. i need to shrink, to fold up in small corners. to get as far from the outside as possible. an intra-exoskeleton retreat.

california stole my heart and on a silver platter thrust it back at me again

berkeley, ca. the hills shine green and gold before the fog rolls in and brings with it a cold humidity and i can breathe again. i'd forgotten how i love it here. i sit on the curb in the early morning fog and smoke and listen to the crows and remember who i am.

we drive up the PCH and i think of steinbeck, of kerouac, of hitchcock and his blondes in convertibles and silk scarves on those hairpin turns. what you don't see in the movies is the colors on the hillside, rust and ochre and bright yellows and greens and this monster veil of fog that has its own soul, that owns the coast. time is a useless, trivial thing. death to the left in the guise of empty steep cliffs and to the right, life and color and brilliance. i could get lost in the hills of big sur and not trouble to find my way out again.

but berkeley, beloved bay area, fresh and clean and cool and temperate with real trees and stunning food. everywhere. too much and it is not enough. nothing in this city belongs to me, it never has. 

an evening with the uncle and me glassy-eyed and vague and trying to hold it together. trying not to think of the combination in my stomach, the twist of the pills, the gastronomic extravagance. i dream at night of sharing an apartment with my dead grandparents. i dream of witnessing a murder, the three smoking bullet holes in his neck.

and we drive the 5 home early because i say i am shifty to get going but really, the sooner i get back the sooner i can grind this madness to a halt. at home i do not eat bacon. i do not swallow pills at random to numb that space in my heart, little orange ones, yellow, the white ones to pass out at night in bed alone. i do not eat french cinnamon brioche soaked in orange-water batter and drizzled with lavender honey. i do not talk about eating every ten minutes and complain of fullness and say in the same sentence that i want more. at home there is not so much family around. there is a difference in physical and emotional closeness, you know. gaping chasms here thrust into sharp relief. at home i am not so obvious. at home i do not have to see it.

the 5 is a high-speed burn through six hours of green and gold rolling hills and flat bronze grasslands over which if you look with the right kind of eyes you can see the curvature of the earth. the sun beats in through the car windows and i smoke all the way to keep myself from floating off. california is vast and empty and glowing and leaves me breathless still.

but LA is a dead grimy thing and when we hit the city proper i start cursing again. sun-bleached, raw and dirty. you cannot hide here. there is no shade, no dark corner not already sticky with sweat. i do not want to touch anything. i want to crawl out of my skin. i cannot eat here. it's so familiar. thank god.

recedere

i ought to stop being such an asshole.

i ought to stop playing games.

that's all we do all day, all the time, isn't it? play games?

give me a bit of time. maybe a little sleep and a place to run and the space to sort this all out, the space to muster those particular words.