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.

she smelled of rosemary and cloves and had those sun-dazzled klonopin eyes

and leaves in her hair in the wind and finding connexions between the books she has been falling in love with, and without a pen, tenderly marking the pages with ash. her books will smell of cloves now, too. as if the words have life only in those pages. as if.

'You write, I suppose.'

'No,' Oliviera said. 'What could I write about, in order to do that you have to have some certainty that you've lived.'

'Existence precedes essence,' Morelli said with a smile.

'If you want to put it that way.'

the world cleaves about into ten thousand translucent planes. truth and untruth. hunger and fullness. writing and blankness. fiction and non. stories we write to entertain and stories we write to believe in.


i don't trust myself anymore. i am all of a fiction. i don't know where my planes intersect. the elusivity of my truths is just as damning as my desperate need to define them.

fear of the dark is fear of fear itself, or so i've heard

more and more i fear the night, the darkness, the darkness in the night. it creeps in at my seams and latches on to the darkness in my head. i become a trembling mess of tears and shakes and cigarettes smoked under streetlights, greedy for illumination. i need to see the world to know it's still there as it was. that there are no monsters under the bed.

i am afraid of spaces in the dark and darkness in spaces and whether, in the dark, my feet will remain bound to the earth or if i'll go flying off. sometimes i'm afraid i won't.

i wake before dawn in coils of sweat and fear and last remnants of too many dreams and still there is not sun yet, still this endless clutching dark. this morning i napped at 6h45 until 8, woke in fear that the warm light splashed across my lap was not real, was fading into night again. let the alarm go off for an hour before i could grasp hold of the day.

there's safety in sunlight and oranges and cereal and i am afraid of dying in every myriad way. i am afraid of the years of my life i had apparently specifically not thought about until yesterday. i am afraid of what might be buried there, what i have done. but there is that oedipus thing, that insatiable human curiosity to know, and i am just as afraid to not find out. maybe there's nothing there. maybe that's the Nothing i'm afraid of.

when disseverance of the heart renders one speechless, poetry is the voice left heard

This Is Just to Say

I have eaten

the plums

that were in

the icebox

and which

you were probably

saving

for breakfast

Forgive me

they were delicious

so sweet

and so cold

-william carlos williams

made of stone

sometimes i just want to sit in the quiet all day long and stare at the wall

and think or not think as seems appropriate

awash in melancholy, in the weight of my limbs

gradually growing aware of the steady sound of the rain and the night

on immobility

    'You know what I've come to think, Jake? I think you don't even exist at all. There's too many of you. It's more than just masks that you put on and take off--we all have masks. But you're different all the way through, every time. You cancel yourself out. You're more like somebody in a dream. You're not strong and you're not weak. You're nothing.'

     I thought it appropriate to say nothing, since I did not exist.

-End of the Road, John Barth

the old refrain. my daydreams play out like films. no audio, low light. we're cast in shadows in the amber light of sunset. i just want you to hold my hand while i lie fetal on the floor, pillow over my head. my hair radiating outward, unintentional symmetry. hip bones pressed into the unforgiving wood. my mouth works no longer and i'll spell out my words on the hand that is not gripping yours.

that scene on repeat. again and again. i do not know what comes next; i have lost the script.

i said too many hurtful things last night. i did that which i am too fragile for. it was easier than saying no, than trying to explain why.

i have had my head under the pillow all day and been spelling words to myself. but where are you? will you not hold my hand in this silence? or are you just part of the daydream too?

futur proche

in my head my daydreams play out like films.

you'll come and collect me, we'll drive up the coast. sun in our hair, feet on the windshield, massive blue sky. waves crashing against the cliffs. your little car on those hairpin turns.

the film is yellowed, the audio hushed and tinny. secrets exchanged and beautiful long silences. you know my demons already but don't care. maybe you won't let me run. i'll be secretly relieved and you know this. you'll hold my trembling hand.

but the film is washed out here, it breaks apart. there is too much light, too much heat.

it cannot be. in truth, knowing what you know i do, how could you stand to look me in the face and ignore it?