Tag: relationships

watching the princess and the warrior

Part of me is hoping you’re thinking of me when you’re lying in the middle of heaven. It’s the part of me that thinks of you in terms of precious lost cities half buried in sand, an archeologists wet dream, someone to explore with eyes wide with wonder and conversations in the kitchen. Here I think a line about apple-pie and hamlet which reminds me your flatmate reads this so instead of typing it, I suppress the urge to wave. The look on your face when you were looking at the ocean, that’s what I see. Half open eyes and a look of almost surprised contentment. The outside world, so beautiful and something rarely visited. The impression you gave, “I like you too much, I’m so sorry.”

A vast pool, you said, of clear blue. Shallow from one end of the bay to the other, it never goes past far past your knees.

It sounds like the sky.

The part of me that lets my fear die, it knows better. It sings to me that you leave to forget this place and possibly the people in it. Lying in such clear water, I know that I would let the architecture of Vancouver drown underneath me like an unwanted cat in a bag. I would close my eyes and listen for new people to fill my life with and then I would find them. You are unlikely to bring me a picture, unlikely to stand at the side of the velvet water and focus a camera, my name the plane of your chosen angle.

This won’t stop me writing you. I still want to illuminate your life like manuscripted letters. Until there is a cease and desist, I will try to convey what you seem to me, faded love or no. Nature or nurture, I look up to your window when I pass and I’m always sorry when the light is off. I blew you a kiss before you left, thinking of the glitter when we sat at the top of a dry water fountain that looked like a stepped pyramid and talked about lock-picks.

Happiness is one of those permeable things. I was happy then, though I didn’t know what I was doing or what was going on. I didn’t care. It’s been on my mind lately, how different I was this time last year, how my life was more important to me. Thoughts preying like a fever on my loneliness. It never used to be something I would consider. Time passes. Either it happens or it does now. All I carry with me is in me, a basic understanding that escapes every Prometheus moment of victory I embrace. Thrown from the mountain, bones were broken and I’m not sure they’re setting. I feel I’ve lost my liberty.

  • A prosecutor claims that a dominatrix dismembered and disposed of the body of a client who died of a heart attack during a bondage session in her makeshift dungeon.

    Today was a write off. Seems I’ve caught up on all the sleep I’ve lately missed, but that doesn’t help me find employment. This hunt is beginning to fortify my thoughts of being a write-off.

    • parsley and vitamin C can induce miscarriage without too much sickness

    Oh world, I can’t get back into my own heart. I used to think in high-hat hits and long pulls across strings, lines of hasty love letters and joyful peeks into a wonderful immediate future of visits and living with me. Now I’m dragged down into a strange bitter sea of praying recrimination and I don’t know how to write a ladder out. What I need is practice and enough trust that I can begin to give some to other people, but though I’m watching, I’m not finding. A half-price muse is no muse at all.

    Page 10 of Jesus Monkey Pants in Space is up, wherein I am a righteously angry school-teacher.

    “What colour are your eyes?” he mused aloud. Granite, flakes of shale, sea shaded amber, petrified tiny stones, glazed over, delicate, pale, green. An acoustic colour, reminiscent of charm bracelets, her chrome charming laugh. Her head bows, dropping hair into her face. She doesn’t want to contradict him. He’s too kind, this place too bright. She has had gray eyes, she has had soft blue. When they are green, it is easier. When they are green, they understand the subtlety of what she needs. She doesn’t have to ask.

    To look at him, he is mild. Slight of build and quiet spoken. To look at him, he is quiet. A smile like beads dropped across the strings of an open piano. His posture is peaceful, his gestures gentle. It’s amazing how little he displays. Don’t judge him until you’ve looked into the eyes of his conversation or the swan necked lullabye of his teeth on your skin. There is nothing weak in his heart, he is calm not complacent.

    Together home is nothing. Only this moment, no more than that. Myth is where they meet, inside urban hosannas of grace and memory. Brickwork songs of sly desire patterned underneath the footsteps of dragons and young princes. Fate is banter, destiny a debate of flushing skin and wondering about regret ahead of time. Home is before morning. Darkness is not so much a refuge as a place, an insidious time characterized by a mutually seductive skill with words, the gratuitous prancing display of modern day courting.

    She’s not that kind of girl, but oh, she is. Shhh. Don’t tell. She’d die of shame.

    I didn’t mean to write about this. It’s too soon to be so blatant about missing you, not that you read this, not that you held my hand the next day when there were witnesses. I’m in the wrong place, but you’re not. You’re so bloody far away from here and I feel like you’ve stolen something from me that I can’t identify in lonely text, only in kisses. Your name, I put it into the internet to learn more about you, and I feel a certain kind of shame. We had a story, a tale of wizards and date rape, of girls drugged and left for dead, of bodies upstairs instead of a cellar. You taught me to swear. It should have been enough, that’s the way of these things. I’m being selfish, wanting to see you again, needing to know that you know what I left you.

    Let me explain, give myself a way out of this self-effacing maze. This being a female, it kind of sucks sometimes. Some of us, we bleed and our hormones drag us toward the people our bodies want to breed with, no matter how in control of ourselves we usually live. Me, I bleed and my body wants to fly into the sky, reach up and touch the elusive clouds, hands buried in the hair of your head. You used my words, my yearning vocabulary. I wanted to say yes, but you scared me. I’ve been alone too long. My showers are shaded like I’m killing children by swinging their heads against the tiled walls and with every drop I want to touch you. I stand in the morning and feel warmth on my thighs. I stare at the ceiling and roll my eyes back into my mind, telling it that I’m unavailable, stop complaining. At night I roll on my side, unable to sleep for the hope flooding my body. It’s annoying.

    So this is me nakedly trying to rid myself of romance, trying to rid myself of your voice when I close me eyes. I’m awake until morning, over and over. A recitative avoidance of dreaming, it’s what I’m singing into the pillow. I’ve been filling my late hours with people, they keep everything away. There are no delicate urges to lay my hands upon them and watch feathers sprout from their skin. Just yours.

    Here the houses look like they were built for a farm or like wild west shacks, wooden two stories with peaked roofs mixed in with California specials, pink stucco’ed things with pebbled glass over the doors decorated with ghostly Japanese fish, as banal as the soap opera digests found for sale at check-out counters. The skyscrapers are uniform glass towers with outward differences that only involve variations in ghastly shades of feeble green. There are no hidden treasures left, even our natural beauties are rip-offs, watered down with tourist-only totem poles and highly priced smoked salmon in little wooden boxes marked with red and black.

    It seems like an aside, but it’s not. I’m attracted to character and here it is such a rare commodity that whenever I find it, I flare out protective, like it should be put on some endangered species list. There are houses here that I used to visit when I felt alone. It was comforting. There’s one out by the University of British Columbia that looks like it was built of lego and glass. I used to have a hole in the hedge that I would creep through at night and sit inside. I would watch the people inside and instead of trying to make up conversations between the people inside or imagine what their lives were like, I went blank. I could feel my general dissatisfaction drain away, because what was in front of my was beautiful. For then, it was enough. I was fourteen and too small to leave.

    Now it’s only a matter of raising bail.

    You’re my attraction, my moth light in a darkness.You are an architecture that let me in. The night was our plaything and we were cats.

    I saved a life and slapped my cheating ex, what did you do?


    New Year 2006
    Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

    &nbsp I fell asleep once in front of tending a fire, an over sized teddy-bear as my pillow. When I awoke, it was startling. My hair thrown back, my feet half under me, the long slender piece of wood I’d used to prod the burning logs poised like a weapon over my baby/bear, I became a flame bronzed sculpture of the classic pose a woman makes protecting her child. Perfectly confident in myself and my action, I awoke the devil’s daughter because the sleeping bear Must Be Kept Safe. I was ready to spring, defend.

    &nbsp I’m a little worn out from feeling like that all the time. I would appreciate respite, a chance even to merely rest aside someone else who is responsible for guarding others, like the two of us together would not have to be quite as alert to ward off danger and so have a chance to relax.

    This is for you, Warren.

    I have been silent here not from lack of content, (quite the opposite), but because my ex-roommate, James, in a fit of infinite wisdom, decided to take my modem with him when he moved out and hasn’t answered his door yet when I go across the hall to ask for it back. Tomorrow I plan on leaving a note. Thank you for the concerned letters. I am not as absent as the internet currently claims I am.

    &nbsp &nbsp My New Year celebrations began as whispers in water. Distant from the occasion, I was swimming through SinCity, (click for pictures), nothing astray from the usual. Dancing, moving, the occasional warm hello. Matthew passed me while I was talking with Sarah and I ran my fingers through his hair when his back was turned, as I used to do. He held me close for a moment, said he was sorry, then walked away.

    &nbsp &nbsp Counting down from five seconds to midnight happened on the dance-floor. The music calmed, we stopped thrashing about and reached out for each other, holding hands with whomever was next to us. There was an announcement of free champagne at the pool table. “Five,” we shouted, “Four.”. We started jumping with every number. “Three. Two.” and at “One”, I put my hands up and threw a prayer. May it all be right again some day. I miss you.
    &nbsp &nbsp Precious Lasilana and I were meant to skedaddle off to the Annex House-party on the heels of midnight, but it didn’t quite work out that way. First there was a brief medical emergency, a friend of ours, incautious with a high-tension social situation, had an anxiety attack and had to be sent to the hospital. Then we lost each other in the morass of black fishnets and too tight corsets. Finally Nick found me, told me that she was outside waiting. First, I thought, say my goodbyes. A hug for Christopher, a faux swoon for Meghan, and a moment being lifted off my feet by Ross, and I thought I was gone, but no. I turn and there he is, that annoying bane.

    I’m going now.
    Ah, I hope you had fun. Good night.     There is a motion for a hug.
    First you’re going to kiss me for New Years.
    I don’t think I could handle that.
    It didn’t ask you if you could.
    I don’t have a choice in the matter, eh?     He smiles.
    No, I don’t believe you do. Find us a dark corner.

    &nbsp &nbsp On the back porch, in a tiny pool of space that the smokers have left by the rail, we stand together, quietly examining another with words. “How have you been?” “Stressed, you?” “Maybe worse, hard to tell.” “Yeah.” We hug and something snaps and melts, it’s small, but I can feel it in his spine. Our faces are both buried in hair, in shoulders, our arms are warm. We pull back to see again and abruptly, Richard yanks open the door from inside, “Matthew, Jhayne, sorry, it’s an emergency, you have to come now!”

    &nbsp &nbsp I begin to laugh, because how consummately flawless is his timing. If we were a film, this would be the moment where the music changes. Our heroes interrupted. I kissed him anyway, and then we ran impossibly quickly, hand in hand through the thick spiky crowd of heavily made-up women in towering heels and men in leather kilts and g-strings, all the way from the very back to out front the building.

    &nbsp &nbsp On the ground, propped up by the wall, is an unconscious girl in a green fairy costume surrounded by too many people who don’t know what to do. Immediately, Matthew and I pull off her panicking friends. Lasilana is already there, she had caught them trying to pour water down the girls throat in a poorly thought out attempt at reviving her and now as we arrived, she began holding people back, trying to calm them down, giving us room to work. I took her clammy body from the cold wall, lean her sitting sprawled against my own and tilted her head back against my arm, trying to open a clear passage for air. We get her name, Jennifer, from one of the smeary tear-faced friends and I begin saying her name, pinching her lightly, checking the tracking of her eyes. Her breathing was laboured as I checked her weakening pulse. Matthew gets on the phone with the paramedics.

    &nbsp &nbsp One one-thousand. Two one-thousand. Three one-thousand, feels a little like the counting inside from earlier, but she doesn’t get to four. I switch quickly from her wrist to her neck. Still no pulse. Four is simply not on the agenda unless I do something. Matthew is busy on the phone, almost standing on the street, and I can’t see Lasilana. I assume she’s behind one of the cement pillars calming crowd people, so I go it alone.

    &nbsp &nbsp The heel of one hand in the middle of the chest, between her breasts, the other on top of it. I press down hard, pulling toward me sharply, press down again, again, remembering what to do without any consciousness. She coughs, fiercely gasps, and her eye-lids flutter. Something comes up that was blocking the air in her chest and her heart thuds almost audibly. I count eighteen a minute. The world spins again.

    She is alive.

    &nbsp &nbsp I sit with her body against me, one hand holding her jaw forward, trying to prompt a response from her until the medics arrive. I don’t even know if anyone saw what I did. We interrogate the fiance, find out that she’d only had one drink, but also a pill and a sip of something that might have been GHB, but nobody knows for certain. We can’t find the guy who gave her the drugs to confirm anything, but at that point, it didn’t really matter. His description is fairly generic for a fetish club, he probably left after midnight. If we’re lucky, he was from out of town. In the end, we sent the fiance into the ambulance with her and explained the effects of shock to her friends. Lasilana lit up a cigarette and Matthew and I fell into each other.

    &nbsp &nbsp Again, I begin laughing. “Are you laughing at me?” “No, love.” I take his hand and we begin dancing to the faint music coming through the wall of the club. We’re calm and in control. I am, in fact, for a while. My forehead rests against his chin, then I start crying, just a little, through the smile. It’s a painful fairy-tale moment. Together we saved a life, together we’re singing softly to the music, I never meant to hurt you, together we’re dancing almost as flawlessly as we worked as a team.

    &nbsp &nbsp “Too precious to discard, too painful to keep.” It’s nice, no matter I don’t know how much it’s meant, no matter that I said it first, months ago, the sentiment is appreciated. It sums up so much of my painful year. It casts the right kind of glow to what happens next. He steps back, holds me a step away from him. “I think it’s time.” We’re gleaming, mischievous now. “Are you sure?” “Can’t think of a better time than now,” he says, and I can’t help but agree. There’s tears in my eyes still a little, but my heart must have shone like the moon on fire that moment. I begin to take off my rings and Lasilana approaches, “Would you like me to take those?” She proffers her hand, “Yes, please. Thank you.” I’m so glad.

    “Are you sure? I’m not sure I can do this.”
    “Never more sure of anything. I owe you more than this.
    &nbsp Really you should be giving me a swift kick between the legs.”
    “But then there would never be any children and that would be a shame.
    &nbsp You might want to close your eyes.”
    “No thanks darling, I want to see this one coming.”

    &nbsp &nbsp My hand felt like frostbite. As the snap of impact echoed off the building he put a dazed hand to his face and blinked his eyes. My fingers were imprinted white across his left cheek as if they’d been painted on with chalk. “Now I know why men roll with punches.” Lasilana approached and gave me back my rings, asked if he’d disappointed me in bed. We laughed and said Yes, but that was old news. “Not even with both hands and a flashlight” he said. I felt like we’d just starred in a series of events that had the strange accuracy of a post-typewriter conspiracy.

    “I’ll call you.”
    “That would be good.”

    Then Lasilana and I, we walked out into the night like two vessels setting forth to sea.
    For the first time in a long time, I felt beautiful.

    lost my face

    Wednesday night I fell asleep with the skin of a bear’s head draped over my hair and face like a mask and bodies sprawled at my feet. I was an urban medieval Frezetti painting. All I needed was a grand gold spear in the hand that wasn’t sleepily curled around one of the black fur ears.

    Last night I didn’t sleep at all. Instead I held someone and let them come back to life. We’re damaged people, love. Yes, I know we are. That’s partially what holds this part of clan together inside our tribe. Family words, meaning country and lover and home. Parents, holding hands. The two of us writing words in the sand, the light off and my glasses by the side of the bed.

    When I’m here, so are you. Everyone reading and here I’m sitting, thinking “what is that sound?” It’s people, trying to find themselves in what I write here, as if it were important. Until recently, I wasn’t aware. I’ve become used to being put aside. The world goes around without me, I think, it continues and carries on. I am the merest drop of rain and the rain will fall forever. New creatures will be born, they will have stories, they will stop and stare at the enormous sky that birthed them and think in tones of wonder long after I have passed my way.

    I should be at a party right now. David Bloom sent out a mass invite to celebrate the fact that it’s not New Year’s Eve. No resolutions will be necessary, bad behaviour will be accepted, but I’m feeling a little lost for some reason. Alone and not a little intimidated, I want to leave the house and instead I’m thinking softly in excuses, It’s late. I hardly know any of his friends. If Bill is there, I’ll make him uncomfortable. Most of all, it’s late, as if they were real. Yet in denial, I still want to have my shoes on. I will leave the house, wrapped in this feeling of abandonment of not. This is what I want to believe. Make myself over into someone who can be brave with this strange cowardice bubble of uncertainty encasing my heart. (This is what I horribly suspect that other people might feel like all the time.)

    Instead, my arms are stretched out, trying to hold onto something beautiful and failing. I’m scanning every face now, trying to see into the future, trying to see who I might encounter as a friend. This city is full of strangers, they look at me sometimes when I walk by them as if I were unexpected, but rationally I know that some of them I will talk to. We will meet some day and speak together, they will tell me they saw me with that hat or the ferret or in bare feet. I’m the red head hippie that girl hated or that boy couldn’t get over. A tragic figure they saw crying. I stand on the street corner like a door I’m looking out of, the traffic a heavy silence, wanting to see that perfect memory unfold before me. The one that I haven’t had yet, because it’s still in front of me, as far away as falling stars.

    Before dreaming starts at night, there’s a time when you close your eyes and pictures begin unbidden through all the caring cells in your body. Mine have been providing me with the sensation of my hands on a piano, my body held warmly against the length of a stranger in time to old familiar music. Behind my lids, it’s not my hands I’m watching, it’s not my feet, the pattern on the carpet or the length of the room between me and that place to stay. I’m not re-evaluating my choices, my flight, my desire to meet those eyes across a room again with an impossible question. Instead, I’m trying to explain with equal grace to those images how much my strange days mean to me. It feels impossible, like climbing a rainbow.

    Where the hell are my angels?

    I’m so tired of being the responsible one. The star in my heart wants to go out.

    A. FOUR JOBS YOU’VE HAD IN YOUR LIFE (all previous jobs):
    1. He sent me a letter
    2. I met him dancing, I was sitting on the stairs
    3. Brought to his theater, we had a friend in common
    4. It was a new place and he was standing by the bar

    B. FOUR MOVIES YOU COULD WATCH OVER AND OVER:
    1. When I replied, I laughed, he thought I would know him
    2. He tapped me on the shoulder, acted like I knew him
    3. I took him up on a roof, surprised he would not know it
    4. We went home together, though we didn’t know each other

    C. FOUR CITIES YOU’VE LIVED IN:
    1. Smiling, we corresponded every day
    2. I was stunned to discover he had a wife
    3. Standing outside his window was so difficult and necessary
    4. In the cab, his english was better than mine

    D. FOUR TV SHOWS YOU LOVE TO WATCH:
    1. There were happy pictures, and clever sounds, and fun videos.
    2. I kissed him on the cheek and told him to ask permission first.
    3. My lips were hungry and two years later, so were his
    4. His apartment was neat, plants in the window, books in the glass table

    E. FOUR PLACES YOU’VE BEEN ON VACATION:
    1. I ran home through the park to meet him on-line
    2. We held hands when we walked and strangers told us we looked good together
    3. Curled up on the couch, slowly we curled into each other
    4. I sat on the counter and he explained his red wine

    F. FOUR WEBSITES YOU VISIT DAILY:
    1. Description sufficed to make my bed less lonely
    2. When I slept over, it was on his side of the bed, not hers
    3. Queen size bed now and we still almost fell off
    4. There was a wide mirror above the bed framed by two guitars

    G. FOUR SONGS THAT MOVE YOU:
    1. johnny boy – U are the generation who bought more shoes and u get what you deserve
    2. lamb – gorecki
    3. emilie simon – graine de etoile, lamb – gabriel
    4. marvin gaye – let’s get it on

    H. FOUR OF YOUR FAVORITE FOODS:
    1. Then the letters came less frequently and I didn’t know why
    2. Eventually I couldn’t deal with the fact he was married
    3. He was so beautiful, but I knew he never loved me
    4. The next morning wasn’t too late, but there was a phone-call

    I. FOUR BOOKS YOU’VE READ & LOVED:
    1. Hurt, I assumed that work was taking his time
    2. Hurt, I broke down, dissolved, died.
    3. Hurt, I tried to tell myself not to believe in illusions
    4. Hurt, I explained to myself that it’s what I should have expected.

    J. FOUR PLACES I’D RATHER BE RIGHT NOW:
    1. Then I finally went for a surprise visit.
    2. He divorced the wife, I took him back, he went away on a trip.
    3. He never calls, so I walk over to his house at night.
    4. Today he called me back, canceled our plans.

    K. FOUR THINGS YOU FIND YOURSELF SAYING:
    1. There was another woman.
    2. There were two other women.
    3. There might never be anyone.
    4. There’s another woman in potentia.

    L. FOUR FAVOURITE ALBUMS:
    1. He never apologized.
    2. I’m fragile too.
    3. Living with little is better than nothing.
    4. At least he’s sorry.

    the prospect of suffering

    Toronto is measured now more by time than distance. I leave at six, get there close to midnight. I still have nowhere to stay.

    Traditional News Year’s is coming, as well as another city, and I’ve been considering if it means anything to me. Today as I was cooking my meal for the train, I was trying to tally up my last three hundred and sixty-five days. So far I’ve been instrumental to one divorce and three affairs. Both my lovers this year ran off on me with someone else and let us all find out by accident. I discovered someone else never loved me in return and one that night stands can be frighteningly easy.

    All of it adds up to so very little that it hurts me. It used to be that my passions repaid me in kind. I don’t know what happened or how to fix whatever it is that shattered. Where is the bowl I kept my heart in? The one I used to offer in dreams to passing strangers as an alms cup. I want to think that my soul is racing to find me and that all the time in between is time standing still, but I know that it’s crying for no use. Apologies aren’t coming, I’ve been forgotten somehow. I’ve seen this face before in the mirror, it’s unhappy. At least when I’m not in Vancouver, I don’t have to think, “He’s walked this street.” It’s like changing where I live in my head. There’s a hi-hat hit and a deep thump of bass and the place I was forgotten isn’t inside me anymore. It’s in front of me, on this keyboard, and I’m emptying everything painful into the ether for you to see and read and maybe understand. You’re out there, it happens, just like everyone else. Why did you never call me back? Only the musician ever told me how to find him.

    I see your picture, all of you, any, and I smile with a sting in my ribcage. I lie down my walls and I let you in again like the best kind of refrain. I love you, yeah yeah, baby, let’s do it again. The part of me that marries people is still carrying you.

    Do-wop-she-bop-pretty-damn-bang.

    There are some basic elements that pain shares with surprise, but I couldn’t tell you what they were right now. I’m too busy trying to open my unfinished business like a dried flower in my mind that’s going to draw me back to Vancouver. All I can find is a job offer, Creative Director of a Friendster-type website, and maybe that I need to pack my things properly. My dream machine is hiccoughing, refusing to process anything that isn’t movement forward. What I need versus what I get. The end of this story has yet to be written so maybe I can fight my way through the ranks of mediocrity with a pen. Ink my skin the same way some people use school to charm the corporation. Electric glass pages, as many as I can collect, strapped to the back of my night time invitations. Writing like lyrics, writing because it’s what we came here for. I want to feel my hand in the hand of the world, keening with me that things have to change to be better, that what we have isn’t enough to live off. There’s too much starvation and not enough education.

    I just might get that tattoo here. Just to carry something with me.

    over a year ago, do you remember?


    Heaven’s in the backseat
    Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

    Here there are no weeds growing, there are no patches of green grass to startle the eyes through the snow and hard packed side-walk ice. The reality is fiercely burning ears, tips of noses too numb to feel, and lips slurring inexpansively from cold. It gets dark quickly with no ocean to snare the sun. Walking down the street is noticing the flash of neon signs reflecting off eye-glass lenses, is watching black trends in coats and scarfs, is wishing for someone beautiful to step out from the crowd to ask your name. I’m feeling like I’m failing at being at peace. I could find something here to capture me, but I’m lost for a direction. There’s so much to explore that all I’ve accomplished is walking. I’m not clicking into place like a missing computer chip, instead I’ve barely scratching a surface I’m not even sure I’ve been allowed to see.

    Why aren’t you here beside me? When I’m running on so few hours of sleep, my dreams are always just on the edge of sleep, as if hallucinations are forcing me down into the bed instead of the insistent hand of gravity. Around the screaming edges of my tired lids are dark curls bleeding into my field of vision, the institutional brushes of a fingertip along the inside of my arm, the certainty that a tongue has just shaped the sounds required to speak my name. I flinch away, turning my head into my pillow, and sink into sleep, haunted by subliminal echoes of another bed, the one I would rather be in, wherever that is. I’m not even sure right now. People make fools of places, expose them for the space occupied that they are no longer living in. My memory lies to me, tells me that if I put my hand out, the right hand will take it, swing it to the softest lips my needs spill into and take my heart from it to cradle gently and let me rest. Sleeping lately hasn’t been rest. My heart is soul searching without me, leaving me always on the edge of exhaustion. I’m finding it difficult to follow simple conversation and the native language isn’t sticking to me at all. Instead, I’m shoving off, wandering on-line, trying to find somewhere within walking distance that would be interesting to be at two a.m.

    I slipped out of the apartment earlier to try and look at the wonder that is the sky. (A pregnant woman survived a fall from it earlier, though elsewhere.) There’s an easily accessible rooftop deck on the twenty-first and a half floor. Through the tiny gaps in the clouds, the stars are a seemingly endless metaphor for a patternless universe. I’m considering finding some of my most solid underwear and going back up. The other part of the roof encloses a heated pool. If I can’t find freedom, I might as well splash my toes around and read a good book. Last night I stayed up reading comic books that James had chosen for me from his prodigious collection. Fast fiction snacks, I thought. Strange little things, not solid enough to take a full bite of. It felt odd to be reading dedications written by people I know in the front covers, like I was deconstructing reality just the tiniest bit. Enough so that maybe when I looked up from the last page, it would be perfectly in time to see an unexpected explosion through the window, chunks of building spinning orange and black into the sky twenty blocks away.

    Well, one can hope.

    I have a media request of the internet audience again. You folk were so utterly amazing the last time that I figure this particular search should be a breeze. James introduced me to a music video, (download), a few months ago at Quickie Culture Night, DJ Krush – Truthspeaking, (linked here as an mp3). He’s in love with the singer, I fell in love with the DJ. However, his work is easy to find. DJ Krush is high in the hierarchy of wicked hip-hop fusion gods to come out of Japan in the last ten years, but Angelina Esparza’s a bit of an enigma. James has been unable to find anything else of hers in spite of a rather intensive search. If anyone’s got anything, could you toss it our way? Personally, I find her a little generic. Instead of finding her enchanting, I’m left craving more video with this man in it. The depth of personality he’s got engraved in his motion is simply breathtaking.

    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.

    • what I have to say after all


    janis won’t die
    Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

    I leave for Montreal in a week and I’m still quietly lost as to what I should be packing. Warm things. Well, yes, I have about three of those. I have a scarf, a half-stolen plaid shirt that’s missing some crucial buttons, and a fleecy skirt. Now what? I’m not even organized enough to get myself fed in the mornings before work. Ah misery me, I’m feeling rather alone.

    Does anyone want a bus pass for two weeks? I certainly won’t be using it from December 10th to 24th. These little bits of foil and paper are untransferable, I’d hate to see the service provided go to waste.

    Also, someone get this “Will design thermonuclear devices for food” (in Russian) T-shirt, for Graham, k?
    And The Great Equation for Nicholas. Thanks. You’re awesome.

    I should be walking, airing out the musty smell of second-hand cigarettes my coat collects in the back room at work, but I am nervous of what I will find once I get past my first destination. I have a secondary plan, there is apparently a corset stitcher happening tonight at Andrew’s new apartment, but the primary is that for a reason. The scathing thing most close to the thin skin of my heart is the first thing I want to address. There is no turn back time, no peering ahead. I had a half argument about this earlier this week with a partially ex-lover. What’s real is what needs to be dealt with, and what’s now is all that we have to take chances with. What should be done should be done, regardless of imagined consequence. This is what I told him, irritation growing. I was falling in front of someone, hitting the ground hard with verbal feet that were suddenly fists curled in anticipation of the general unfairness of the world. Me, I surprised myself. I’m not used to admitting heat into myself. I usually keep everything I want very under control and very away from me. He said that I was intimidating. I would be surprised except that I’m beginning to get used to it.

    What happens when you begin to reject neglect in the face of everything you want?

    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.