Month: November 2004

I’m sitting in a cozy cafe on Hollywood Boulevard, grooving to the Beatles and quietly seducing every single male on premises. I have the phone numbers of every staff member and customer. Plus some who merely wandered in to talk to me after seeing me through the window. No-one here expects girls to have purple hair or something, it’s amusing. I ran away earlier to escape a rather unsightly ex-military man who tried to tell me that Nietzsche was the answer to all the worlds ills, but now I’m back at The Green Room being plied with free juice and comfortable company, having been rather put off by the tag team trip that Zorro and the Phantom of the Opera were laying on me just up the street outside the famous Chinese theater. This place seems a bastion of sanity, full of skaterboy intellectuals and musicians who speak physics and comic books. One of them asked me out dancing.

Up the road is a seething mass of tourists, stopping in the middle of the street overwhelmed by the neon spectacle that I simply danced under. Everyone wants to talk to me and I’m more then willing to talk back. I hung out for a bit with the official Walk Of Fame photographer and we traded stupid celebrity stories. We know some people in common. A security guard outside the Kodak theater told me the history of his people, a tribe in the middle east who escaped war with their splendid embroidery and a young man outside Ripleys Believe or Not tried to sneak me inside while explaining his recent break-up that was apparently culminated inside an exhibit with a bout of bad noisy sex that got her fired.

I need to live here sometime.

I was even welcomed by the pimps of the hookers in santa hats and red miniskirts trimmed in white fur. If that’s not a glowing endorsement, I can’t think of a better one. They sang for me as I walked by. “Oh graceful woman, stay some time with me-e-e-e” It’s one for the record, harmonizing pimp boys with gold capped gold teeth. The world is more interesting than fiction.

I like it here. When the plane banked over endless blocky rows of gray roofs, I felt welcome. The traffic was too small for me to see. The delineation between the blue sky and the burnished pollution was beautiful. This place is made of ghosts, soaked in our culture. A creation of form and fancy as sweeping as the graceful curves of the freeways. I sat waiting at LAX for hours, watching people. I sat where the cameras must have gone in the first scene of Night On Earth. That I was a sight to folk at the L.A. airport ropes me some points.

We had dinner in a towering dome of a spaceship restaurant and we drove to Venice to show me the beach. Today I’m going to try and find The Strip, where the galleries are, where the concerts play. I want to pry at history. I know the music, let me find the places. I slept last night and I dreamed.

It feels like being home, there’s so many people. The aggregate tumbles on for miles out of sight. Industrial lights blazing like stars, I can’t wait to see the daytime. Cars smoothly slipping down the cloverleaf curls, it’s thrumming with electricity. Deathless, this place is deathless. The softest recognition feathers into my brain and I love it.

I’m going to catch a train and wander alone. I should go now, before I see myself.
Jump in straight, the fire won’t hurt because I know what it tastes like.

I suspect I will be like a poet, sewing stones to my body with every day here.
The souls best poison is love.

It’s four in the morning again. It’s inexorable here, there’s no option to turn it off. It smells like rain outside, but in my room it smells of sage. I opened the window when I thought I heard the buzzer, but perhaps I didn’t get there fast enough. I leaned out a little and softly called to receive no answer, the wet lack of moonlight on my skin reminding me of the time. It’s warm now, the clouds trapping the heat of a million sodium lamps, a thousand mis-timed lovers arguments. The sky is lit with distant lights, a musty fetid orange puce. Hesitating, I closed the window. This is the weather that drives me to walk to beds where I would be welcomed by that ‘you silly girl’ toss of arms around my body in the dark. I don’t think I have those people anymore, the replacements have left town too and I don’t leave the house enough to collect new ones. I have to leave in the morning, I shouldn’t stand uselessly outside houses my friends used to live.

It didn’t used to mean anything. Spam didn’t used to be poetry or socio-economic histotrophic paeans:
discussion of civil society. There’s almost no ethnographic detail no probing of the motivations of individuals or the role of Islam and democracy in local communities. There is at least as much variation at this level as there is between states and even — or perhaps especially — for specialists. An academic with a background in both economics and political science Lindblom remains calm and dispassionate throughout; he also seems remarkably free from political presuppositions though

I am tired and wish I could sleep.
I wish I could hear you behind me tonight.
I wish I knew what you were like to touch.

The chlorine kisses me with silent accusation. I don’t want to be here and the water knows it. My teacher is as chilly as standing wet on the side with my toes on the edge and the other kids don’t like me. I leave my towel next to the clinical tiled showers and the faceless pay-a-quarter lockers with their identical orange keys that make me feel smaller than I am. It should stay dry there, but it doesn’t. No-one talks to me unless they are telling me to do something.

The deep end of the pool has secrets at the bottom. I look down past my blurry feet scissoring the water and I imagine I see sparkles. It is the holy grail of my grade two swimming class. The blessed few who can reach it lord their ability over us, puppies treading water in brightly coloured bathing-suits. I think the sparkles are wishes. The day I hold the bubble in my nose and touch my tiny fingers to the dark blue bottom, I will surface knowing how to play cello.

Lifting my life into science makes the day easier.

Tomorrow I wake up and look over my room like I haven’t in a long time. My eyes will scan over all of my belongings, tracking for any needful things, attempting to pluck them from the jumble of gold edged fairy tale mirrors, tins of oil paints, lite-bright paraphernalia, and metal lunchboxes full of photographs, ticket stubs, and birthday cards. There will be something almost essential that I leave behind, it’s a given, but that will not stop my gritty gazed morning search of the premises.

This morning I spent in a half aware nightmare of nasty dreaming and tidying. My body is in such need of dreamscapes freedom that it was unshakable for hours. I was aware and up and moving, but couldn’t shut off the narrative, the slew of images. Synthasia in the way I picked up a scarf of saffron silk to the feeling of rough gravel in the palms of my hands, how adding it to the windowsill heap of fabric threaded through with a man telling me to run, the helicopters were coming, the searchlights would pick me out too easily. My need for healing rest is becoming slightly dangerous. In a very real way, I am flying to California to sleep.

please world, let five days be enough.

Blame Michel.

It’s part of a civil engineering joke. *blank* I am a fox?

This is some sort of double entendre, innit?

People crept quietly on cats paws raised
in defense of noise in defensively
the film reel will catch hesitation
basic betrayal in the street car line

I have key words I need to expand. I want to stop falling back on blood, bones, breath, water, and shimmering stone. The sci-fi entwined in the concept of self to the point where I don’t have friends anymore. Cool sweet strangers, I love thee like pixelation, sweep me off my feet. It’s worse when I see them on the street. My eyes telling me that that god-damnit is how they would move.

Honey intentions, it’s alright. This is therapy, love. I take this word and that question and make it my own to heal you with. I don’t have to get involved in your little joy. I don’t intend to. The two way street is horrid in it’s simplicity. It is sublime to be wanted and not needed later, if only for ten minutes. Kiss me, but don’t make it mean anything.

There’s a kid in chat who writes me stories and I can’t write anything back. I get caught in my need for a story and my elusive penchant for creating rather adult interaction. I don’t know how to write stories, I don’t know how to make a beginning, a middle, and an end. The plot thing escapes me. The theory and plan that live inside me are so inadequate for stories that it’s laughable. I feel ridiculous for even claiming the word writing, no matter that this is made of words.

The wave of heat blasted into them after the air-conditioned plane. They blinked, unable to focus their eyes through the wavering air rising off the tarmac. “Of all the places in the world to visit, I chose this city.” A painful glare coalesced into an approaching white mini-truck on fat orange tires. “Dear lord, they must be kidding.” The driver stepped out, ignoring the passengers for his headphones that had apparently slipped out of place, his long braided hair caught in the wires.

movies tonight at my place – 8pm – pulp fiction with a side of natural born killers.

Elegant pretending, talk to me again about your thoughts at night.

You have come into town unexpectedly. We stay up until four in the morning talking, when dawn comes I am exhausted with my head in your lap. I’m sweetly unconcious when you hear keys in the hallway lock, the shimmery jingle and hard clunk of the bolt turning. You falsely assume it is my roommate. When my door slivers open, you are surprised but quiet. The man in the doorway was expecting to creep in, undress, and slip into bed with me. Instead, you are here and I am asleep, a question mark form with your hand on my head. “Shh,” you say, “She’s asleep. Come in.”

I don’t know, but I think that night I sleep alone on the couch.
You two are adults, you figure it out.

Letters to the Editor
Attn: mmaloney@vancourier.com

Re: Sadomasochism conference whips up criticism
Elaine’s letter to the editor