Tag: love

How much chi can a cheetah tie if a cheetah could tai chi

The Take-Space people were at it again yesterday, this time renting a parking space just off Main st on Hastings. When I went in the morning on the bus, they had put out bright green astroturf and a few lawn chairs, though they were still struggling with a summer awning.

Photojournalist Martin Adler murdered in Somalia.

I was on my way home from Michael’s place. I’d stayed over after the delirious Cirque Du Soliex show, Verekai, not wanting to shift from such wonder to my drab apartment. We stayed up watching Harvey Birdman Cartoons on his lap-top until we couldn’t keep our eyes open anymore. My sleep was full of exhausted glitter and the strong desire to find something I cared about doing. When I woke, nothing had congealed, but I felt distanced enough from the Circus to face Vancouver again. Previously I had wanted too hard to see costumes on every corner, spiraling away from me in the morning clots of commuters, I wanted to look up and see stars in the bright day-time sky, and find giant colourful birds singing in unexpected places. I wanted to wake up in a Romany camp in Italy, grungy and smoky and full of red cloth. I wanted to wake up with longer hair and a prettier smile and some strange skill I don’t have a word for.

Everyone keeps asking why I don’t try to be a writer.

Finally by S. Koyczan

Boyfriend man is so glad
your dad hates him

he’s finally the dangerous man
he always wanted to be.

Shane Koyczan will be performing a free show on Wednesday at the Western Front at 9pm, 303 East 8th, just off Kingsway, as part of the opening night of the West Coast Poetry Festival, (July 5th through 8th at The Western Front. All events are by donation.) Show up early, as seats are going to fill. Bravo TV has been following him around all week taping a documentary and this performance is going to wrap it all up. Winner of countless awards, including a few World Championships, Shane’s got a talent, a hard-worked gift, and he’s worth the hard traffic of half way across town. I’ll post as much of his performance as I’ll be able to tape, but there’s nothing like seeing it live. He thunders.

(verso) I can’t remember to forget you.

http://sevenphonecalls.org/

Devon came out of surgery fine. He’s tired and looks worn, but that’s to be expected when your innards have been slipped out of your belly and rewound, I’m sure. His intestines had twisted, kinked themselves into knots in ten different places. There’s no need to worry, he’s resiliant, recovers like I do from damage. I have a fabulous picture of him in the hospital bed, looking put upon by uncomfortable plastic tubes, holding hands with his beaming parents. I didn’t get to post it last night, unfortunately, but it will be available soon. He’s possibly not sleeping enough, but that’s so close to normal that it almost doesn’t bear mentioning. We’re a batch of night owls, we are. A coven of ridiculously interesting people who are most alive when everyone else is in bed. Dancing with blades, dancing in gruops and apart from eachother, dancing and being glad that life continues. Sneaking into hospitals at ten minutes to midnight and being turned away at the last possible moment.

Duncan’s got a livejournal.

Various people have been asking me what my plans are this week. As of yet, I really don’t know. I’d been planning on going to the Pacific Cinematheque double-bill tonight: Paul Williams hosting THE MUPPET MOVIE and PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE, followed by an After-Party at the Media Club where he’s going to play a set alongside July Fourth Toilet, (no, I don’t know who they are either), but I expect to skip the first film entirely for the sake of visiting hours. Tomorrow I may end up missing rehearsal for the sake of other things. Visiting Devon in the hospital, for example, or dropping by Bob‘s for a showing of A Tale of Two Sisters, one of my favourite movies, (just as Phantom of the Paradise is my mother’s), and finishing the cleaning of my room that’s been dragging on for something akin to a month simply because I’m never there anymore.

http://notyourusualbollocks.squarespace.com/

“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.

Bringing me back to life to(o).

Walking across bridges at night used to be one of the more dangerous things I could do. All the hollow butterflies cut out of my tummy silenced when I finally stood on the rail. All the water catching the lights. Why does the ocean never reflect the stars?

A man found dead on a NYC subway car may have been dead for hours before anyone noticed.

It could have happened like this, I could have lay on my back in the middle of an intersection.

Instead, I picked up the phone. I dialed. I said, “hello”.

It’s a heavy on the saxophone moment, an understanding of grace with a long hard breath of sound. “Hello” Yeah, I know that one. Emphasis on the beginning of the word, low on the aich, more air than vibration. “Is this?!” There’s someone in town who knows how to conjure your name, your careful explanation of the hazards of cussing out christians in french. You know the game. It’s like a quick agile dance, how we speak. Soft insinuation this way, a little that way. All of it encapsulated in the way I shape your name. Those eyes, watching mine watch your hands. I remember that ring, but I didn’t think of it at the time. I almost offered to trade. Now I know that would have been meaning for meaning. We’re lunatics.

“Jhayne, can I ask you something?”

“Anything you want.”
“Are you crazy?”

The children were delightful, small tiny voices that didn’t know english. A catastrophe of insane grinning.

Sleepless in Seattle re-mixed as a horror movie.

Mike was upstairs when I wrote part of that, but all I heard was the soft susurration of cars passing by in rain. A very vancouver thing. The room I was in is full of polished steel appliances and red hardwood shelves clumsily full of yellowing books, a modern room cleverly awash in english antiques. The lamp at the foot of the stairs, (which has on the landing a half-size grandfather clock), is a bronze victorian woman, hands upraised like victory, a torch in each hand where the lightbulbs fit. Explosions In The Sky playing quietly, making the moment feel as if it was cut out of a novel about a lonely young professional who is questioning life enough to make an interesting book. It would have the kind of ending where you feel incomplete for having run out of pages.

That was before going to Afrikaa Bombata on Thursday, while waiting for Andrew. My day had been splendid, full of fierce joy. My smile felt like it would crack, I was so happy. Friday was different. Friday was still, flying in a comfortable holding pattern as my absent keys looked for a way to land at the shop, where I needed them to open with. (Raphaella came bringing the succor of sweet responsibility, no worries.) Friday was a dopamine calm. Friday I woke naked after an hour’s sleep in an unfamiliar bed. Friday the door opened at nine:thirty as I was about to tie my shoes and Kyle came in with a metal pail of tea and juice and bottled water.

Turkish court dropped the case against renowned writer Orhan Pamuk

My hero, my clumsily found grace. He lives only a block away from my home. The worst part is that this is perfect timing.

the closest I’ve ever come to begging

I stepped outside with no direction except away from the fear. Years long, it lay unjustified until tonight. Solid, it destroys, shreds. My feet stopped at the edge of the street and I watched my hands gather snow into a little ball. This runs deep. I’m beginning to feel my lack of sleep like a knife. Every hour I laid awake in the past week is now a weight tied to a vice that’s seizing my throat closed. I didn’t look away when my body stood and began to walk. I was too busy locking my joys away in logical conclusions that describe why I should always know better. Who am I to ascribe worth to my self? This is the argument. This is the cause and self-hatred. Hope should never be let into my house. It has keys and is cruel. The piece of snow my body heat turned into ice became a metaphor and I threw it violently down, away, and didn’t look when it shattered.

>slowly

I did not ask to be let in to their room, but I was welcomed. My coat was told to come off, my scarf and shoes as well. The hat was to live on the back of the couch, come stay. It’s cold outside and we’ve made things with chocolate. My sad suspicions told me this was a bad idea, this was a moral test I would fail, but I stayed because the welcome was genuine and it is not their fault that I am wary and wounded. I sit pointed away, a puzzle composed of elbows and knees that fold into themselves and touch nothing else, and I am hesitant to speak, to intrude upon these people who were not planning for me, who do not know me except as an accessory, but I am handed a cat and expected to be at ease. Expectations and cats are fabulous pieces of social control. Peer pressure, peer pressure, watch some of our television and learn to be a little more real to our eyes.

I should have left when my trust kicked in. Comfort isn’t allowed right now. I should know this more thoroughly than anyone. It hasn’t been at all this year. Instead my lessons require stronger aversion therapy, because look – I’ve made the same mistake twice. When he came in, I put down my dignity, the very little I’m left to scrape together, and invented gods to pray to, so that it might rate some significance to another human being. I never should have come without being called. It was a very cold walk home, long because I couldn’t see through my salt stinging pretence of integrity. There are no angels, only people with wings. A woman stopped me half way when she said, “Hey honey, don’t look like that. If they see you’re broken, they won’t want you.” My feet gave out and she kept walking. Tomorrow I’ll find out if I bruised my knees, all I know now is that I can barely feel my fingers.

There is no distinction in writing this down, but it allows me to communicate with the ether. The vast formless place that language came from. I have been realizing this is my spirit guide, this is my starving on top of the mountains. I try to make here worthwhile with information dissemination, as if every link were an apology to the possibly hypothetical reader. Of course everything here is public. No matter how useless or sacrificial I am to my needs, no matter how exasperated I am at myself for pretending to worth, if it weren’t, this would be the equivalent to screaming into an empty box, closing it, then expecting to hear echoes the next time it’s opened.

I was taken care of in every way that never matters to me. That’s why I forget, you see, because needs and desires are different ripples on the dance floor and my body can twist without me. Bread is nothing, but oh, holding my breathe for me. (‘?o baby i wouldn’t like Death if Death were good:for when(instead of stopping to think)you begin to feel of it’). The heart, that’s what insists on guiding me, that’s what needs to be fed when it complains. There was a warmth in my hips when he sat with me. I remembered how suddenly his hands had defined the curves of my memories, but I knew by the tilt of his laughter that I wasn’t going to be let in where I’ve needed to be. Out(in)side is still starving, there is more than an empty two days. There’s a few years backed up, complaining, waiting for me to address them in some grand speech. Last week I whispered to them. “Remember that name you’ve always kept secret? It’s talking to me.” Last week I forgot who I am, and persisted as who I used to be. See, last year I knew how to smile.

  • Ted Dewan designed a series of “DIY traffic-calming happenings,” including living room furniture sets in the middle of the road.
  • Atheist group offers free porn in exchange for Bibles.
  • Steadman, a band that released their whole catalog as MP3s when Elektra folded, is seeking donations.

    • you’d think I would have figured this out sooner, but no

    Let me measure this in ancient yellow string.

    The length about my finger. Reminding me, the ticking clock. I’m wasting time, it’s sorrowful.

    &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp So one day I see him and another day I don’t. The mental pull that tells my body what tasks, what tasks do I do now, what tasks, oh his feather and face, his body is warm, better than mine when we’re together, it. Skip, fast forward, the inside of my need is black. How shameful, this tense coil spring around my. Skip, pull on me. Want me too. Do this, believe.

    How far around the palm of my hand. Open as conductivity, the electrical sound of that slap.

    &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp And every day I can’t stop thinking.

    I think I love you.

    It’s a good thing they can’t see inside of my head. This shift of weight, it’s guilty, heavy with barbed moments of lucidity. Memory, armor, that little touch of wet tongue to the tip of my. Skip. This devil in me bought with hurting too much, with being too old for all my age, for never getting to just relax.

    The distance around my fist.

    He didn’t mean to hit me. I didn’t mean to hit him. It was instinctive like the setting sun. Defend.

    &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp So I come back to this window, fascinated by unfamiliar fear. I want to be brought in from the cold, but I am terrified to pluck at the blanket. Other side of the glass, I turn and look outside, my vision crowded with every possibility. That one was a drunk, he might be dead. That one, he was ruined when I found him. That one, I was never as interesting as he was. That one, and this one, ten in all. Too far away, oh my bleeding heart. Even a child can count to ten. Even a girl like me.

    I’m scared of my second paragraph.

    I’m going to dance on my own grave

    Vogue, December '05

    A ghost slid into bed this morning and placed a little kiss on my lips. He was cocaine pale like a stone and as smooth as if water tumbled. I frowned and turned my head, the dead are not welcome in my bed, but he was persistent. My body began to hold the smell of suicide, of unhappy older women trapped in elevators. A long way to hell, I thought. The distance between his chilly hands and the last button of my shirt. The dead are clever, they orbit the lonely like satellites. They are a constant undertow trying to drag dreams too deep, close enough for them to touch. They promise success, but deliver only the cold light of the television. And this one was trying to take off my shirt.

    The other side of time, I might have let him. The static song of his seduction was soothing, calming as a technocratic lullabye. Instead I opened my eyes, reached out my hands, and tangled his wings with the wire and string of my hair. Ghosts are small, collections of mental bacteria built up over uninteresting lives. They are usually as romantic to the eye as a plain white t-shirt. Capturing them is only difficult if you believe in angels and I am too old now. All my bridges with mystery were burned a long time ago. Sitting up, I examined the glow I caught. His eyes were a building tumbling down, a video clip on constant repeat, surrounded by a halo of jasper. A city creature then, sailing his ship through history. I wonder if he regrets how he survives. The lives he must have crept into as a memory, the ambitions and aspirations he’d cruelly siphoned off paper hearts to live off. I swear they have intelligence. Some inbred understanding of language, built layer by layer as they accumulate.

    Romance lasts little over a year, Italian scientists believe.

    she is so pretty, so pretty, yes, like I remember, oh milk, they gave me milk, like pixies, a thousand names, pale like I am now, but to live, oh pretty, fire, flame, smoulder, a lamp dying, oh to touch, rain, blood, she burns, a spoken word, glimmering, pale like crystal, her skin, give me, please, her skin like milk

    Kiss may have been fatal.

    There are small silver scissors next to the bed. I take them and cut the ghost from my body. It’s still whispering, wrapped in my hair, waiting to wreck the party, but quieter now. I’m beginning to be awake enough to think. I lie back in the bed and watch the steel gray dawn coming in. Last night’s phonecall was me drunkenly walking a crooked line. I remember every word he said, how he’s busy lately, how the world is spinning too fast for a visit. His absence must have been broadcasting as loudly as teenagers flirting at a check-out counter for the ghost to have found me so recklessly easy. It’s either merciful or frightening to think that the slippery sound of my heart is so enticing. Maybe I should use some of those orange pills in the cupboard.

    In the kitchen I find a jar the size of a fishbowl to put my new pet into. I spit into it and punch holes into the lid with a fishing knife before dropping him in with a crumpled page from one of my favourite books. The words reverberate and the paper begins to decay softly around him as he makes a little bed. Another happy ending ruined. The idea scrapes at the embers of my ruined evening and fuels my inner annoyance at how easily I push over. If I were a better person, I would stand up for myself, pound on the stubborn shore at the ugly sea that’s been drowning me. This is what I tell myself as I pour myself a glass of water. I pop the pills and notice the ghost is glowing brighter. Feeding him with my saliva was a good idea. Keeping him around will force me to resist the urge to burn this place down.

    the evolution of hindsight

    I saw him in a photograph today, handed casually to me across a table. Part of my heart remembered and died, the rest of me got caught in the night captured. Shane was on stage that night, in a way he never had been before. We were there, this place, but across the room. It was this person, and my person, and Him. We sat bunched up on benches, layered like only the most comfortable friends can be. One in front of the other. I could lean back and taste happiness with my skin. I did. I could lean forward and see god on stage, orating. I cried. Later became one of our own little secrets. The image of him waiting outside, “I thought you would never leave.” It was too cold, we said, we thought. It would have been perfect. A silence held between the bare space between our bones, the breath that never came after the knife slid in. I don’t love anyone else, they’ve been pushed out, replaced by this one terrible figure. This creature that drives me to need blood, to need touch, to need… to need at all. I didn’t know how before. I haven’t drawn breath since he left. I haven’t drawn breath since he returned.

    I should have pressed harder when I knew something wasn’t right.

    This is the oldest story. My name is Psyche. It is widow. It is dust. I am a woman and my love has left me. Thrown me over without word, fled in the night when the candle was lit, but without a stanchion of rules for me to lean against. Fled uselessly, as I have no way to find him. History says I may get over it. That is all history says. It makes no promises for having a future that is not bereft of happiness. It is more honest than that, for all that it was written by man.

    He called today, maybe while I was being handed his graven image. My vulnerability flared bright, limning my walls with pain, then flickered out. Flame requires oxygen and I have none. My blood is cold, sluggish and heavy, the same as my hands dripping letters upon these keys. I love him. I finally understand an aspect of religion I never did before, the desire to have protocol, to be able to hide behind ceremony. My child inside has revealed itself to be a newly lonely thing, unholy and made of roses. Petals are falling, He loves me, he certainly loves me not at all. Maybe he did once, but he forgot. He spent too much time as a bear instead of a mouse. Living in the skin of an animal, it’s said you lose your way. I’m uncertain if allowing such creatures into the home is a good idea. They make messes, they desecrate the sacred places. He used to sleep in this bed. We used to sleep in this bed. I remember being touched, being touched without crying.

    When he left, I wandered the airport, refusing to leave without finding myself a memento, a tiny piece of sadness to carry as a solid thing. You’re like a dream, what if one day I’ll wake up? My eyes grazed over tables for silver and found nothing until the very last shop. There, on a shelf, a necklace of glittering red crystals that looked like a slashed throat set in victorian pewter. I put it on before I left the building and I have yet to take it off for more than one day or one night. It carried the promise of his reality with it, holding my neck where he kissed it, where he touched me goodbye so sweetly that a porter smiled into his sleeve at us like in an old-fashioned movie. I took a picture of myself on the bus back into town, trying to see what it looked like. I tried to smile, thinking how stupid bravery is, how I wanted to cry. Black and white and read all over, that’s me, I thought. He’ll call when he lands, he’ll call and I’ll tell him about this and he’ll laugh.

    I feel better that I didn’t believe him when he said he was writing about me.

    priorities suffering (this is a repeat)

    I’m worn.

    I lost a job today. One I needed for well being more than anything fiscal. They were kind there, and laughed. Instead I will be setting the sky on fire. Taking wires and powders and alchemy. One night crying with chemicals in the dark where no will see me but they’ll see what I make.. Part of me knows I’ll think of you when I press the silver button. I’ll blame it on your pictures and where you live. If I’m lucky, I won’t say your name. It’s been a hard year and I can’t forget your eyes. Every time someone puts their hand to mine, I remember yours, fresh in my mind. How the tips only just overlapped yours, how my fingers were slightly longer in relation to my palm. Then I remember kisses and I have to close my eyes. I tried to put together something for you tonight, I needed a distraction, something to bring myself out of how hurt I’m living, but weariness took over, and now I’m writing this letter instead.

    I’m not sure why. I think it’s a survival reflex, hoping to break the silence.

    it never seemed so strange


    1540- A
    Originally uploaded by Least Wanted.

    It’s not like I don’t love him, but when I see his picture, I don’t catch my breath in my throat. I don’t automatically grin at our lives existing side by side. There are symptoms that it’s possible to checklist. I think that we might have been kissed out of the same womb on some other plane, and sometimes he’s older than me and sometimes he’s not, but I think too that good friends are hard to find, no matter how often they cry, no matter how often they misunderstand you because they see a little so much through their own filters of Not Good Enough and Wars to Win. It’s an old story, maybe the oldest one we know how to tell. Boy Meets Girl and It Changes Everything. Feelings that never pass easily, emotions that claim us as theirs no matter what we think we want. Once In A Land Far Away is next door and yesterday, a gray pleated skirt in a coffeeshop talking on Russian History.

    He wanted to be in this narrative since the first time he read it. I don’t know why it took until today, but perhaps a program grinding in the background has finally finished processing and a card punched full of holes has slipped out of my tongue to the black plastic keys in front of me. It might be that in my pictures, I can see him smiling at me. I understand that urge, to smile at the glass lens into someone’s eyes. Inside me are the same instinctual reactions, the same chemical manifestations of an infatuated membrane broken heart. These twisted hieroglyphics, yes, I speak a similar language. It’s as immortal as a virus and as tenacious as a lonely child. On an elemental level, the only way I know to explain is to say that we dip into the same river to pray.