Month: July 2005

time field happen on

When I was a child:
Running in the night,
Afraid of what might be

Hiding in the dark,
Hiding in the street,
And of what was following me…

Now hounds of love are hunting.
I’ve always been a coward,
And I don’t know what’s good for me.

Here I go.
It’s coming for me through the trees.
Help me, someone,
Help me, please.

Take my shoes off,
And throw them in the lake,
And I’ll be
Two steps on the water.

I found a fox
Caught by dogs.
He let me take him in my hands.

His little heart,
It beats so fast,
And I’m ashamed of running away

From nothing real–
I just can’t deal with this,
But I’m still afraid to be there,

Among your hounds of love,
And feel your arms surround me.
I’ve always been a coward,
And never know what’s good for me.

Oh, here I go!
Don’t let me go!
Hold me down!
It’s coming for me through the trees.
Help me, darling,
Help me, please!

Take my shoes off
And throw them in the lake,
And I’ll be
Two steps on the water.

I don’t know what’s good for me.
I don’t know what’s good for me.
I need your love love love love love, yeah!
Your love!

Take your shoes off
And throw them in the lake!

Do you know what I really need?
Do you know what I really need?
I need love love love love love, yeah

My Lover’s leaving this week and I’m a little bit scared that my heart won’t be as stable as I need it to be. There’s been so much waiting to even find myself where I am, a place where I feel like I can finally love this man without endeavoring to make myself small. The noun turning into verb, the cards laid levelly on the table. I’m so good at keeping everything contained, what will happen when I don’t have a constant reminder that I need? My job is a welcome distraction, something new, but not anything that can go home with me. That might be what I require. Something to keep me from sitting alone, counting inhalation after exhalation, the number of times I blink in a minute.

I don’t know what anyone reading this must think this is, what all the waiting has been about. I can only say that it should be worth it, if even only for a year. I’ve been careful without thinking, my respect paramount, and I have no idea if anyone knows the situation who does not directly know me. My regions of thinking aren’t apparently clear in these words that spill from my fingers to warm this moniter lit field. People like it that way, when they’re mentioned, when I’m writing this to them, but sometimes I would dearly like to break. Toss in names and situations that have been eating me away. Explain why I carry this ridiculous sadness, why I pretend not to be secretive about cradling pain within myself.

Sometimes a melody will draw from me something deep, a line of sunlight that cores in my arteries and forces me to go search for open air. Find some friends and explore where we’ve never been. It’s harder to do here, we have to go so much farther afield to simply find a direction that we haven’t memorized. The exercise, when successful, leaves you lost and discovering, trying to find the nearest village name in the hopes of something to eat that isn’t highway sign fast food. With temerity, we may even leave the country, switch the colour of our money for a monochrome green printed with less interesting faces. When I see a plane fly overhead, I think that the people captive inside that little machine know freedom more than I do.

Princesses dancing beneath the castle, shoes worn out every night. I was always a little jealous of those seven girls, seven nights. I am invisible, stuck in the middle, a strange drag on the boat. Again, the feel of pale stones against my teeth. I could spit them like teeth, pearly and scraped by a thousand words but instead I leave them in, swallow them clicking down my throat to rest in my belly. They can whisper there, abrading my tensions with a heavy dusk weight, grinding them down into poison that’s easier to digest into fury. Noise isn’t what I’m asking for. I want meaning to flower into splendour here, analyzed into fractal machines and the percentages of smiles versus tears, wet cheeks in rain on a sunny day.

Blood thudding in my veins. I’m going to feel so empty at the airport, just like last time and the time after that. They’re always the same, escalators and railings. Potted plants that are carefully fake, not even silk and ruined when they get wet. Signs that have been bleached blue by daily wear, left over from the seventies, when all these places were made. The big travel boom, when suddenly the globe was seen as that. When Paris was still romantic and no one here had been to Prague. I always watch until it’s time to walk away, the realization dawning that I never know where to go from there. The day should be different, something incalculable has just changed, but it’s always the same. The day spins, weaving a night and fraying into a new morning, never minding that I am without a set figure of “you”. Past participle sleeping, past and passed and the day is exactly like yesterday. No one notices.

Distraction is about to become more precious. Black leather pants and he’s not my type at all. He’s thickly built and lacks grace in his language, it’s unnerving. He doesn’t dance with me but it doesn’t seem to matter. He carries my deepest sleep in his washed hands, cupped palms full of sand that keep me mercifully above water. My skin doesn’t care that he doesn’t wait, that he doesn’t speak what it asks for. My energy can’t crackle until that happens, but somewhere there’s a key. It fits into the lock and turns stage left. I’ve seen it happen with closed eyes and an arched back. Lightning caught in a gasped breath and my hands trapped in hair. Artists will tell you that it’s all in the wrists.

Administrative Assistant



Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

The kitchen is clean. I am considering celebrating. Those of you who have visited recently know the implications of that statement. For those of you who haven’t been so unlucky, it seemed for awhile that my roommate was observing a strict regimen of experimentation, hypothetically breeding new species of super fruitfly. It was all for science. It had to be. That was too many of the little annoying gnats to be otherwise. Now that the kitchen has been cleaned, I will take on the bathroom in return. A serious exercise in scrubbing shall occur, oh yes. Time for the cool clean taste of bleach. I would still like to know where to get a carnivorous plant to placidly hunt down the remaining kamikaze insects, but for now, I am no longer living on the edge of a war zone of dishes. Insert the ticker tape parade here.

As part of making the self a home, I want to map out my new body rules, examine minutely the fresh schematic I returned with, but I think they’re still in flux, still settling and finding their edges. I don’t like people casually touching me now. Arms around my shoulder, legs against mine when we’re sitting four to a couch, I’ve been avoiding it. Instead I sit apart. Family is exempt, as they usually are. Not the blood relatives, but the clan I’ve created with empathy adoption and matching personal mythology. It’s odd and unexpected, a new layer of adaptation to paste into the mental environment. I require space now, room for my skin to breathe.

Apparently I think in rhyming scheme tonight, how upsetting. Can I escape & call it spoken word?


ziegfield
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

And with you I am not be. The waves push forward to the base of my throne and mock me. Immolation is the key here. Flames reaching past the wind to pull my hair in the middle of the night in a foreign city. Listen, there’s a sound here. It’s a heartbeat keeping time with surprise. It’s all very self involved though I think you’re seeping into me, humility a flag I bear that no one sees because the cup is not full but half empty. It’s like I can hear you laughing. The whole we are stardust thing and the sand is burying my feet in the salt that the earth gives us to dream about. Horizons go in both directions. Over there is another world. Youth bears crosses the way wiser heads never will. We speak of light and ruination and think we mean it. Mind the ship, steer the storm.

Break for chorus.

Here’s the King Kong Trailer for those who asked. He fights dinosaurs. Over the Girl. Yes. It’s got some wicked style, nothing artistic, but as a cliche homage it seems like it’s going to push the envelope. Game On.

Take the Bridge, it’s faster.

It’s tiring, hearing your name used in conversation casually. My reaction wants to sit and pour a cup of tea, forget that what I mean to you is not what you mean to me. I’m a girl, a scary thing, a creature that should have a bit more whimsy. Taking the chance was worth it, a koan I know by heart, a catchy pop hook that I hum incessantly. Music on means it’s time to hike up my skirt for freedom, give the soldiers something to think about on the front line as I bide again. The quickest I’ve ever kissed somebody, I swear upon that question about colour, but remember the gold is a state secret. There’s no other way to pay the tariff fee.

whipped cream with gasoline on top

KOREAN MOVIE MONDAY

This week we’re watching Attack the Gas Station.

Directions: walk west along broadway from commercial along the south side of the street. When you come to the psychic lady building, knock on the lower left windows.

note: Nicholas, Andrew wanted your manly emissions. He is sad that you have left. Also, David Byrne and Andrew W. K. should make an album together and call it House Party.

starlight on fire

Running underneath every train of thought are rails spun entirely from unknown quantifiers. Perceptions as metal shining blind to the horizon. I find there’s an imaginary border between hypothesis and knowing, one I don’t know how to measure. My mind takes the substance there and fashions it into flowers that drop from my lips, the blessing curse of the youngest daughter, and I hold them up to light, examine the colours for clues, but I’m not always satisfied. I want to plunge my finger into the center of them and taste the idea pollen living there. It’s intimidating, this habit, like living with angels aiding my foot-step tongue or pre-determination haranguing me daily to hang in there when events turn too stressful. Occasionally, I am appalled by how much I take for granted, how much understanding of the world I assume. I used to be uncomfortable with the entire concept, that the unconscious flow moments of big-picture recognition that are sublimated inside me somewhere represent an axiomatic system of balance. Every day I expected to realize that the patterns were only hyperbole moments of tying moments together conveniently enough for belief to kick in, (there’s a word for it that William Gibson is fond of, but it escapes me at the moment), but every year has been proving me wrong. Over and over again I’ve been justified in my unwritten understanding of the underlying motivations in various aspects of inter-person relationships. It’s almost tiring.

Certainly, it’s also been occurring to me that if a person walks around with enough self-confidence, people become willing to bend around them and so the same effect is achieved though through a different channel. This is, however, too irritating to consider. I tend to discount anything that regards my social circles in such low esteem however ego filled such a statement must seem. It’s sort of an automatic assumption that in spite of the fact that most of us are odd in some way, we have ourselves sorted to a healthy point, a mind-set place where outside requirements are nothing more than they should be and that validation comes as much from within as without.

trying to make tinsel with forks in a blender

I thought it was a helicopter but it turned out to be my hard-drive.

My computer is officially going to explode. My mouse is wire-short suiciding in sympathy.

This is more than slightly worrisome. There’s no more pretending that a full wipe is going to fix it. Anything that grinds that loud, enough to give the illusion of blades chopping the air thirty feet above my building, is on its way out.

There is a saint created in lonely iron.

I undid the top buttons of my shirt to let him press his hand against my heartbeat. The heat of him held me down, we were like statues in the midst of madness, the only still people on Heroin Row. Crackton’s the one place in town that I won’t take my shoes off. We were an island, addiction beating as waves, as sound around us. Singing and screaming, people yelling and scanning the sidewalk for dropped rock or cigarette butts. There’s no darkness to hide in that doesn’t already have its own slurred speech. It comes at you from all directions, the pleading of the needy.

I used to live there, right behind the Carnegie, in a strange space in the basement of what used to be a vintage bank, all grand ceilings and open floor. The shambling creatures that used to be humans are familiar, the hounds that chase them nothing new. Once I woke up there and opened my eyes to daylight and the sight through a crack between the curtains of a prostitute shooting a syringe into the base of a mans penis that she was firmly working in her mouth. He screamed, but I suspect he liked it.

Nocholas is coming to town today, an impromptu plan. Plans for today are somewhat fuzzy, but I don’t think we need any. He’s going to call when he gets into town. If anyone’s interested in meeting up, give me a call as well. He’s got some phone numbers but not many.

Which reminds me, Andrew‘s lent me a hand held PDA thing to keep phone numbers and writing in. I’m trying to get rid of my phone avoidance and actually call people. Part of this will be having phone numbers on me rather than in a single, mostly old, list on my computer. Part of my problem is that when I meet people, I tend to collect their numbers on little scraps of paper which soon get lost or on my hands which end up being washed before I write the digits down. This PDA idea, I am finding it exceedingly useful.

I can’t help but think of Baraka



Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

Alastair is thin, putting my arms around him is like putting flesh over bones. Until today, I’d forgotten how that felt. When I think of him, I think of what he looks like – how he smiled crookedly at me once while standing naked in front of a mirror, how he moved, quickly and fiercely, his drawn angles matching in some brilliant sketch of a walking man – and I glow for a moment, remembering.

When I met him, I thought we would be together a year. Months piling into months, days a flow of photographs and dance music. We would go to clubs together, we did when we were here and we did when we were in L.A. He would always look better than me, but I liked that. That he cared made me happy. I dance like a goth hippy, all waving hands and jutting curves, but he dances like a spider might, crouched black and thin with side to side movements. I can’t blend in as well as he does.

When he ran up to me today, he looked slightly different, like there had been a re-adjust of the system since I said goodbye at the airport. I imagine I might look a tiny different as well. I’ve lost weight again, and my hair’s turned red and gold as well as plum. It was hard to say goodbye, to decide to take that first step toward the plane.

We never were the same after a certain conversation.

Tomorrow we’re going for tea. He’s going to call in the morning. As always, I’ve not any idea what we’ll talk about, but I don’t think I have to. It will be enough to see him, imprint his cellular structure again in my mind.