Tag: darling thomas

we woke up to an astronaut kidnapping, “how future is that?”



Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

As I hung up the phone, the silence bloomed and spread petals of unease, beautiful enough to be mistaken for a memory. Art film freeze frame on a slow pan scanning the room. I let out a breath, banishing the illusion, in an attempt to force my sharp disappointment to fade. It didn’t work, instead it settled deeper into my belly, as if I had been eating something bitter.

Then Shane called and kicked my sorry ass. The beginning of the end. It was a terrible time to be at the party.

I get out of the cab, familiar in my city, trying not to wish myself elsewhere, trying not to transform the crowd around me into strangers, the cars into rickshaws, the breath in my body into words of goodbye. I turn around, refuse to walk in the opposite direction, but do. I fall into the flow, swing my eyes away and forward. The yellow car is eventually lost in traffic.

Once moving, the ghost of old poets take me and I understand, finally, how a person could walk into the ocean, how they could continue walking, slicing into the waves like a knife, until there is nothing but water.

that valentine thing is just asking for trouble

Doomsday Clock moved closer to midnight.

The lovely _griffy_ tagged me for the Five Things People Would Be Unlikely To Know About You meme going around. I’m wretched at these, but she is a dear, so I’m going to acquiesce.

1. I take his hand to mine, press the palms together. “Our hands are almost the same size. I hate that I forget these things,” I frown, “but I do.” Our fingers lace and a concrete feeling of being helpless in the face of wind flows through me. He feel delicate, as if I could collect him effortlessly in the curve of my arms, curled like a black and ivory flower. He glowed at my birthday present and flashed it to everyone, smile like a searchlight, showing me off, my cleverness, my care. I am drowning for affection, but I can tell I’ve been torn down too much. My best efforts to memorize him, the way he danced in his seat, beating a musical tattoo against the table at the restaurant, won’t be enough. I will forget, these moments will fade, lost in the wreckage. Stricken with this thought, it is all I can do to put my eyes elsewhere. My role is that of the cherished escape, the lovely creature that will stay witty and safe and warm. To be otherwise would be to admit defeat. I look down at the table with relief when someone launches into a story about working with the Smothers Brothers and try to genuinely smile at the Bill Cosby anecdotes.

2. Before my accident, I was quietly training to be an aerialist. I loved the feel of the cloth, the clever twists that let me safely drop from the ceiling to hang by one ankle, gently spinning, four feet from the painful ground, the ability it grant me to fly. My fall from grace, I have never forgiven.

My Valentinr - foxtongue

3. “I really do love you, you know, with what is left of my heart,” I whispered. Innocent of indecency, those were the words pushing at me through the dark, insisting in spite of the forsaken ache in my chest and the possibility that our intelligent friend in the next bed was only feigning sleep. He said nothing in reply, but held me tighter.

4. I didn’t wear skirts until I was 17. I still don’t wear skirts that hem above my knees unless I’m going dancing.

5. Filling in for my ferret is a small silver pin fashioned to look like one that I wear on my coat lapel. I bought it during the holidays, though I couldn’t strictly afford it, because I’ve been beginning to find myself standing in my dark kitchen at four in the morning, cuddling his tiny frozen body, and something in me is aware that sort of behavior is so generally frowned upon that a substitute must be made. Thirty dollars is worth a more conventional flavour of sanity.

I dyed my hair so you carry me with you when you leave.


Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

Minesh has left, gone back to The Smoke. Sweetheart that he is, I saw him to the airport Wednesday and took a bus back into town. He’s left me a small stack of fascinating seeming books with erudite notes written in the cover pages that I know I’ll never have the cleverness to match. They’re sitting next to my bed, now, waiting for me to pick them up and soil their pristine pages with my fingerprints. When he sent me a note to say he got home safe, which I never doubted he would, I sent him a copy of Maginalia.

As if to gracefully ease absence, the airport then apologetically delivered up Michael Green late Thursday night for the tail end of the PuSH festival. Which means, lovelies, that I am generally unavailable for shenanigans until Tuesday. Call me then and don’t expect me to be home checking my messenger.

Heart of the World news, there isn’t any positive. Monday I sign papers to the effect that if I give them the deposit, they will not pursue any legal action against me. There’s nothing else I can say.

It tears my heart.

it must be three in the morning there

“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.

This will not happen again until 2106.

alone in my room but for you

In retrospect, the resonant frequency between my voice and yours, (between 300 Hz to 3400 Hz), is too many decibels for the tongue to remember. Instead I want to offer you a hand-woven microcircuit, a dark map of my hair from when your fingers were caught in the grain, pulling just enough to make me catch my breath. I want to give you a pattern of wires that precisely describes the dark streets that shudder in the corner of my mind as a memory in minature of when we were lovers. Because it’s enough to shut out the world, that hand-span recollection caught behind my eyes, trapped fluttering and warm. You mean Prometheus, a back-seat wedding of mythology and fact. It’s enough to separate me from my actions, from my current behaviour, and set my record function to pause, rewind, play back, play.

On Wednesday, tomorrow at two minutes and three seconds after 1:00 in the morning, the time and date will be 01:02:03 04/05/06.

I catch myself dwelling on your skin, a shade pale like porcelain, on the colour of your absent eyes, how they crack my indifferent sky. The sparks of impressions you left, I wrap them around me to keep warm in the rain. They are blurring, becoming one thing. A cloak of constellations to quietly change my point of view into something fierce and gentle and forgiving. I feel honoured and privileged, a mirror lens of potential, young and unshaped. Lacking focus, but learning.

my itinerary’s solidifying

All who are interested in heading down to Santa Monica for the Gregory Colbert show say “Aie”. It’s time, duckies. Easter Long Weekend. The show closes when May begins, so we’re running out of time. If I have to, I’ll go alone on the train, but I think this should be by group design. It’s too beautiful otherwise. Help me, come with me, let’s go.

In the same sort of vein, Sophie‘s looking for Sin Borrows. I’ve just recently tossed out everything I could have given her, does anyone have anything proper that would fit?

we're so awesome

HOWTO tag walls using laser electro LED graffiti.

I hung up the phone and smiled again. I feel like I’m at a train station and one of us has run next to windows, shouting “I’ll see you again sooner than someday.” There is reason and love in my mind and it’s nice. So few are my moments of grace.

I watched, enraptured, as someone played the saw last Saturday. I love the tonal structure of it, the glissando that arc out to pierce the audience so effortlessly. I swore again, as I have at least once a year since seeing Delicatessen, that I would find someone to teach me. Burrow tells me that all is required is a saw and some insubordinate patience, but I’m not so sure. I’m going to trust her on this one to the point of digging out a saw and an old bow, but past that I’m shy. How silly will my injuries be from holding this sort of musical instrument wrong? I can only dare not imagine. It’s not like gamelan, where the worst I do is pinch a finger carrying some of the bigger gongs.

he needs what I have but can’t give away

There is a raccoon stuck bottom-half inside a tree, I see it when I walk from the bus-stop. There is a man on a blue ladder, his arm up to his elbow in the hole, trying to shove the squirming creature free from the other side. I want to walk up to the situation and reach up and grab onto the creature, ignore the claws and teeth that would tear at me and pull. Yank it free in one smooth movement. Instead I run my tongue over the inside of my teeth, ossified pearls, and walk away. I will be late if I do not go now. I am obscurely disappointed my skin will remain intact.

  • Net-funded professional journalism.

    I’ve been sleeping heavily lately, as if everything shuts down, as if my soul goes absent. I’m not used to it. Every morning is a dim entrance, a watery sky debut into a film I never needed to see. It’s like there’s a blanket of dust over me in my dreams. I twitch, I can feel it, just on the edge outside of consciousness. My body is trying to cope and maybe not doing as well as it used to. There’s something in my head getting in the way. It’s like when I lie in bed, when it’s time to dream, my mind seizes the chance to escape me, drive fast and away, disassociate from the crashing tide of conflicting shades of ache that run underneath my point of view, instead of resting, instead of taking the space to relax and fix my scrapes and bruises. It’s tiring me out, not being in my body. I have to find someone who knows how to connect the bits and pieces. I have hopes for Saturday.

  • The Sexy Beast is talking to you.

    Today the radio plays songs I used to listen to last year. It’s like nostalgia without the immediacy of caring about what happened. My in-box tells me letters from people who used to be my lovers. Someone drops the word muse on me and I smile, warmed by a rare spark of feeling worthwhile. If they weren’t so far away, that’s exactly what I want to be. The weather here never changes. Overcast with a chance of sun, sunny with a chance of rain. Always water from the sky. Even when it is blue it looks gray. I haven’t taken part in creating in a long time, too long for me.

    • oderint dum metuant (let them hate, provided that they fear)


    anima/animus
    Originally uploaded by sucitta.

    Waving from the road to dreaming, I fell into bed and didn’t catch the last thing Brian said to me. I heard “the nightly practicing for death” but that couldn’t have been it. I think I was asleep before he left. Those words were just my own brain haranguing me.

    video: emilie simon – flowers

    Sleep felt suffocating but required. I haven’t been very good at it lately. Instead it’s middle of the night and I can’t sleep. I’ve signed off-line, I’ve curled in my bed under the covers, book in hand, but I can’t read. Instead I catch myself unable to focus, to concentrate. My eyes scan a page twice before I give up and finally lay it down. I get up, I stretch into a coat, leave my apartment for the hall, go up a floor, and climb the ladder upstairs, breaking the lock on the trapdoor if I have to. (I bring a knife for this in my pocket). I stand on the cold black gravel until my body protests, then I leave. I climb down the ladder, put the trapdoor in place, and go back to bed. It doesn’t help. I don’t know why I do it. There’s just an essential need for escape, for change.

    video: emilie simon – live in concert

    Middle of the night and there’s a man next to me, tangled around me long and warm. I pause, hold myself still while I try to conceive of who the hell that could be. Yesterday kicks in, leads me to understand it’s my friend, that my heart may beat again, that my nails may sheathe. Middle of the night and there’s no roof here, no grand cascade of jeweled pillows, no ferret curled up on the floor. Instead of dark, the sheets are white, they smell like home, like him. His hair tickles a little and I carefully brush it aside. I don’t want to wake him. I would not miss this for the world. In fact, I know that’s the sacrifice. Tomorrow will burn me, tomorrow real life will begin again. A door opens and six close, pulled so by the wake of wind that’s blowing through our actions as he moves in his sleep and pulls me close to him.

    Today I received a warning letter from Flickr, informing me that my Flickr PRO account will expire on Tuesday, April 18.
    I had to read it twice, because it pained me to think it was so soon spring again.

    “I will see you again”


    a spur of the moment decision
    Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

    video: Royksopp – What Else Is There?

    He was a broken angel, a stunningly beautiful boy sitting on a saxophone case on the side of the road. Purple hat, bottle green pants, blue leather shoes. We nodded, one eccentric to the other, and he spoke to me in french. I remembered him, later, from so many years ago that I might have been a different height.

    I stood on a table and shouted last week. “This is your only proven chance. The Right Thing is to be, not some societal structured decision on what’s polite.” I hadn’t felt anger like that in so long. I had forgotten. My voice, it snapped off the tips of the words. Hot words. “Do what you need to do now, there is no later.”

    I think I’m going to bring him home with me. A bad idea, but a necessary one. When the chemical conversion has finished, I will either be snuffed out or unrequired, but this is the time I have. It’s rare to find people as scraped hollow as I am. He’s going to be a father in a few days to a child he didn’t want. Roe VS Wade for men.

    He called me Pandora, the man I shouted at. I love him more than I should be allowed. Traditionally, Pandora was a poisoned gift for man, sent by the gods to punish the theft of fire. Beautiful, deft, clever, and with a talent for healing, still it was her blessing of mischievous curiosity that brought worry to the world, not her grace.

    He is one of the people, precious and rare, who bring fire. I would hate to follow history, but I worry that I will. Last night as I walked home the nine o’clock gun sounded like storm heavy thunder. I had sat with the boy for two hours, his heart a black shuttered star, still guttering, else I would not have been there.

    When I left, I poured barefoot into the night. When I left, he closed the door. When I left, I said “Good night, sweet prince, dream well. The world is still waiting for you.”

    When I had dangerously opened my dowry, my carved box, I had tasted faith.

    Ides of March, perfectly the day after Pi.

    He sounds like a man who would nervously laugh when you turned him down.

    Darling Thomas, I left you like bragging rights, like the falling end of winter. A tongue full of stars could not explain how kind your eyes were, how when you winked at me, I very suddenly understood exactly what you meant. Dried memories read from broken electric pages, light spilling in soft s-curves from your lips, the consonants ticking like rain on the window, that was my favourite. Lying in a transitional place scraped free of complications, your whispering to me felt akin to holding my hand over a precipice.


    entry
    Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

    She sounds like a girl who wouldn’t remember your name the week after.

    We are a strange language, affectionate, improbable, and temporary, more a comprehension of melody than a general theme, bridging the artificial gap between where we are and where we’d rather be. Dreams of fractal social interaction, the idea that happiness is possible. Mathematics would deny our existence, stating us as too improbable according to our friends, (Aesop’s fables ignore us), but by candle-light, we carry the sun unmarked in our teeth. The lights off, it’s cats purring instructions on how to build the world a better and faster moon. Clear as a dancefloor, we are unexpected brass mirrors of old-fashioned magnetism, the current underneath the world that explains to blood which way to flow.

    dum spiro, spero (while I breathe, I hope)