you read of me, but you never needed this

I am thinking of your voice.

I expect your eyes when I wake. Directly in sight of mine, instead of this parking lot bed with it’s empty sheets. Painted lines of smeared lipstick and formless rumpled blankets, yours, but mine now. No one is here anymore, the broken building barren. No one asks for the cathedral voice anymore, I sleep in this coffin junction all alone.

Idle minds painting pictures of memory, we never could stand it. Minor miracles required, your change into mine incomplete, like we were always waiting for the paperwork. Letters eaten by the faulty inside postal service, no worker bees to listen, only a kittens plan on conquer. I never could tie knots what stayed any length of time. That was your break-up song, fifties songbird sadness trapped in bobbysock white wedding dress colours with thick heavy bass hitting underneath. Thudding like a breakbeat dancefloor, “I don’t think you should wait for me.”

Clean supernova crash in the clench of my teeth when I taste what you look like. Your lips never stayed on mine long enough for me.

Melody, merry, mine today and tomorrow and the next, but the next I take him, maybe, it’s a possibility. Defining grateful, graceful, the edge need to be wanted. Arrows edge, hearts blood. The colour, the desire, painful dreaming of something, nothing, in particular, like the sound of the messenger burble telling me that there’s someone saying. It used to be there and now it’s not. It used to be here, I could feel it, I could mean it, but now it’s faded, the sunlight bleaching the colour from the wood, the feel of the grain from the tips of my fingers to rest upon your face like a hollow parade of meaningless praise. I don’t know what you want of me, you can’t tell me, you can’t deal with me. I’m too close to something scary, I would go into the back of the cave with my hand, a vice, around your wrist. It’s dark and it scares you and I don’t care. When will somebody trust me?

There’s someone here with dark hair and gold, there’s someone and someone and the two of them meaning chances and risks and neither one but a kiss and a whisper and what if I in the dark did this. Those girls, they know what I talk about. My room is cluttered with old disks and new books, trains of cloth gold, trinkets. Here there is no-one, here there is me and my flying mouse. Blue light lit below by red, the eternal agony, thinking in grotesqueries of myth. Sweet prince, dark prince, let me find someone to bite. Skin to ripple in writhing and names, let there be love like trickling honey, sweetest honey, honey blood for brains for mind for this of all things under the roof black sky. Mid-life crises, cracking bones to drink the marrow. The stories tell if I eat your heart, I’ll learn the tongues of animals, it makes me think of DJs. I could eat the ingenuity and spin records, spin. Jet black towers with hair, only one groove, falling. Cascade rivers of escape, rope, gleaming, twisting through thorns. Everything boils down to sex with you.

A bitter girl would say, would think – devotion, adoration, the wound, your love lies. It’s a consecration ardency, jamming the speakers with cotton mouth snakejuice. Addiction high potency, trickling from the mouths of pain, it’s a fallacy. Crawling on your belly against loneliness. I’m not so bad, the gene didn’t kick in, maybe when I’m thirty and properly jaded with sea dark green. I’m still young, I still dream of a foot in mouth disease.

as if there is no

I just recieved a letter from my mother:

There is some sad news.

Gord Beezer was in an accident last week.
He fell from the overpass at the courthouse at Robson square and had to have brain surgery.
He is at VGH and resting now.
It looks like he may make a full recovery, but Bob and Francis were very worried.

I have not visited because his condition was critical and only family allowed.

In many respects, I am family, but I don’t think the doctors will particularly respect that. I’ve known the Beazers since I was four years old. This isn’t what I expected to be closing my eyes on night with. I suppose this isn’t a scenario I ever could have thought of. One of those, “not in a million years,” which we humans are so fond of.

If any of you are the sort to pray, his family might appreciate it.

I, however, only have hope. It takes time to find out whether that’s enough or not.

enchante non

Thinking suddenly of Tolkien, she leaned over her keyboard and typed in the words, I’m back.

I sat on the plane next to two deaf men whose conversation started bleeding into my awareness. One of them noticed when I smiled at one of their jokes and we started writing notes back and forth. It was interesting and maybe not worth the rain here. There’s no snow anymore, it’s been washed away, lost to me. They gave me the window seat about two thirds in on the trip, pity it wasn’t sooner. It was a clear sky over L.A. and I could have taken you many pretty pictures. Here it was overcast, gray white spinning the sky into nothing to see, nothing to hold. Ray met me at the airport, but had to go back to work, so I’m alone now, in need of people. I may head up the road for groceries, let myself settle back into this shell of an apartment “home”.

snippet of bodyworlds

I went to see the corpses. I wanted them to have names, for their voices to cry out still. I wanted to touch them, run my hands down their preserved bodies and kiss them. It was a heavy feeling, this love and sorrow for the dead flayed and shown. Nothing vulnerable, until I saw the exposed spine of a man leaned over a chess board. Something in that made me want to cry. Why were these people not allowed to keep their names? Why were they taken down from being less than human and put on a pedestal celebrating our fiery glory? I craved a word about their lives. Maria Chan, schoolteacher. 1967 – 1998 She collected butterflies. I needed to touch them, to lick their skinless faces, hold them, cradle them into my arms and say that I was sorry. I never wanted them to be stripped of voice as well as skin. There was a pressure, I wanted to take photographs. I needed to share it and the quotes on the walls.

heavy metal thunder blaring

Cookies delivered, packages processed. Seems a long way to go to assuage some manageable moments of foolhardy abandonment, but the propellant is enough for me. Now I’m waiting for James to arrive in his spiffy vehicle I look forward to snapping a picture of. I’m glad the thing is finally fixed, in time for the rain to vanish and the roads to open up on the way to his Laurel Canyon home. I’ve cookies for him too, payment and thank you for spending time with me in this unfriendly conglomeration of small towns. This place is made for travel, not people, and I get lost in it. Carried away with the belief that pedestrians are on even keel, I sit for hours on transit, devouring books and deflecting looks from those who find me unwelcome on the bus for my skin colour. I want to smash some of the pre-projected stereotype here, but I don’t know how. There’s no place for we on foot to go but from bead to bead of dew water on this decaying concrete coil of road. It’s possible to walk from neighborhood to neighborhood, or more honestly, town to town, but there is naught between. There are lengths of decaying concrete, little shops with boarded windows.

Soon I’ll meet people.

Just in time to leave.

when you’re lying next to me

I just spent an hour sipping pure butterscotch from a jar and stalking ants with a little spray gun full of ammonia. Somehow, this may be the closest I ever have come to having a Hunter S. Thompson moment. Dangerous chemicals, weapons, and frightening mind altering drugs. Check, check, and check.

This is for my blonde Bill:

Frank woke up tired. Hot sounds today, long drawn out sighs. The remedy obvious but unavailable. He slipped off all his clothes. Face to face with a laid back reflection, the blistering water always runs out too soon. Side to side, soap in hand, this is useless, he thought. He closed his eyes and let the water run cold. Ice prickles on his skin. I am not alone, he thought. I am not this sorry man, standing alone in the shower, unhappy. I am a god. The water began to freeze on his skin, hoarfrost traveling down his bare legs and into the drain. Molecules began to slow, entropy receding outward to the rooms of his house. He opened my eyes. I’m right, he thought, and the sun stopped.

He gave me, “one day Frank woke up and the universe ended”

I’m like a damsel in distress

Today I’m listening to hip-hop and wondering what happened to my enthusiasm. Am I really so shallow as to be wiped out merely from a fruitless train trapped day? If I could speak french, I would call this ennui. I woke up this morning swathed in a grubby cloud of apathy. Yesterday I felt like looking up and pounding on the ice which was obviously keeping me trapped under the water in another world. Today is like the hang-over. Wretched bodied tiresome breathing. I think I need people. I think I need friends. I want to shoot something enough so that it can’t run faster than me when I go to claw out the carotids. There’s a city up the way with art spectacular with no-one to share it with. Somehow, it’s crippling.

I’d like to apologize for what I am about to share. Especially for the synths. For the chimes as well, though less so. I don’t know who the creators are or if they should be punished or not. There’s something compelling about this track. It’s like a hippie car crash, the post-punk destiny for the those who believe in scented coloured candles. Perhaps it’s only worth an entire listen through to those with the right sort of sharp edged humour. I don’t know. Tell me what your thoughts are.