“The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.” – James Nicoll
When the Anti-Choice choose abortion.
Your cathedral eyes, I can see them through the telephone, carried by the documentary grain of your shaky hand-held voice. The subtle circus is in flames, tonight, with me here curled up like a teenage child and you on the other end, my mirror. It’s ridiculous, our travel backward in time, as if I should be wearing a poodle skirt, something light, pink. Black shiny shoes and pastel socks. My knees bent, my arms wrapped around them, I am an unembellished postcard, a childhood that not even you remember.
We are talking quietly, as if not to wake our parents, the non-existent neighbors, the hush of sleep come crawling, come knocking at your chamber door. It’s a lot of information, the image of your black hair wrapped in your little stories, the memory of saying goodbye like gritty sand, all of it leaking long distance. Our words have the antique innocence of empty bottles stamped from a factory and abandoned in a cheerful whore’s attic, they wear garters for the hell of it and lay hands on to heal. Good night, we say, and we mean it. I can’t sleep. My bed is cluttered with books in among the covers, paper reminders of then versus when versus me and now. We make your apartment an area of darkness, blank, fishbowl wish you were here, welcoming and new. We make you a thick furred cat, rubbing against my legs and glittering verbal sparks. Briefly I wish I had a cigarette but can’t place why.
For those interested, there are only two Ceilis in Vancouver this season.
Actually, that was a few nights ago. This evening I celebrated Friday the 13th by going on a Girls-Night-Out, (possibly only the second time in my life I’ve been on one), with women from the Moon Festival. We went to Avanti’s, the strange little pub up on Gravely and Commercial that feels like it’s been transplanted from some tiny redneck Oh Canada town, then to the Portuguese Club. A very drunk old man tried to attach himself to Beth there, (I’m sorry I didn’t get any pictures. She was amazingly dressed as a dutch milk maid, complete with red checked table-cloth bloomers and a fake flower crown), and I was asked to dance by a handsome man who sent a friend over with his phone number on a scrap of newspaper. (When we left, he blew me a kiss.) It was very traditional, somehow, all of it. Even our stumble up to the Havana for chocolate pudding. We told riotous stories about drunken evenings on nudist pot-haven islands, people attempting to snort lick-em-ade, misdemeanor moments on public transit, and having to slide down pyramids in Cancun.
