purgatorio

first time forever in an airport and not hungover and wanting to die. i have a bubble-wrap of joy around me, a lovely hummingbird waiting for me at home. 


so. five days with my family, the very nexus of my distress. is this just anticipatory numbness, or am i really feeling all right? yes, go on, give me your third-degree. don't expect my affection because i won't do it anymore, i can't, you're a black hole, you're sucking my insides out. i am still strong yet. i will not let you leech my joy. i will not be your charcoaled remains.

it's sunny outside, and hot and dry, did you know? not for long. i'm sitting here in limbo, in no-place, the spaces between worlds, a confluence of ten thousand anonymous people in rows of space-age chairs, bad carpeting, useless knickknacks for sale, just waiting. i, for one, am waiting to be judged. 

unicorn

yes, i've fallen in love, darlings! 

i never knew it could be this good, that life could be this good, she could be this lovely, i could be this ok. 


and don't tell me it won't last; i won't listen, i'll cover my ears and sing and daydream and skip in the summer sun with my legs bare. i mean, wouldn't you?

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.