I’m a velvet encased palace today. Bottle green pants, a black tank top, a pale pink tongue. The world is full of girls like me, I just haven’t met any yet. It’s such a shame. Kiss me sky, please kiss me. Tell me that I can learn not to be haunted by that devil smile, that ragtime pair of whispering lips. Desire has been lying to me, telling me that I’m beautiful and I don’t need that right now. This week is set aside for young reactions. The ember burning boy knows I’m the sea and stars, and the memory of that dizzying reaction shall be enough for me. My cup of human kindness was quietly laid to waste with my lover touching someone else’s skin, so now I need to find the will to make another. I’m getting better. It feels superficial, but I don’t know enough yet. I’m still learning. Maybe it will turn out to be easy to rebuild. I can feel focus accruing on me, meshing with my skin. It feels top-heavy, hollow, but I suspect that’s just who I’m going to be right now. A pop song princess, simple, lyrical and confident if shallow from the inside out.
Tag: relationships
blessed, the way, it is
You are what I haven’t written about yet. Stability and comfort, two unexpected islands ringed by eye-liner, shored by language and anchored with glyphs in the middle of the night. That you’ve never seen me naked means something for once, like it did when I was younger, before I began to try and discard romance because everyone around me had grown out of it years before I was born. You are what I haven’t questioned, because it won’t matter, because what you are thinking is enough for me. I watch you and it’s like I can see a mist around you, an aura of intelligence that I can walk into and feel safe. It should be uncomfortable, but instead I feel like I could fit like a smaller matryoshka. Nest inside, curled like fingers over the keys of an ivory piano, and sing with you, creating chords with the words you haven’t learned to say yet and yours that I never thought to know. You are slender fingers poised artfully and laughter longer than your hair. You are interesting in a new way and I’m hoping you come home to me. I like your smile. By the end I’ll owe you so much time, I’ll owe you so much effort and attention and missing you more that I worry a little at the deficit I might be wracking up this month in my time of tasting peculiar dust. You don’t see how strange this might be from my eyes. This city’s been a bloody cage, bars of people and relegation, since I walked out into the desert, saw visions, and never found my way back. My house has been cursed this last while and my luck brought out from under me to be thrown on a pyre of miniature disaster – who are you to stand by my side? You’re the closest thing to freedom that I’ve held by me in quite some time. That you’re mild, it’s fresh spring water. Something clear, something to carry in my cells after standing dry so long. I’m hoping somehow that it doesn’t matter that I’m hanging by threads, that the ink used to write on my heart was just bitterly burned, a frostbite scorch needing too long to heal, and threatening to scar in complicated knots. I won’t claim you’re the only person on my mind, but you’re patient. Like stones in fairy-tales I said, and it’s true. It will be enough.
New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin speaks openly and candidly about the current situation in New Orleans. Transcript here.
From unquietmind, “One of my jobs in monitoring the Associated Press photo wire. I see hundreds of images that will never be published, but I think these photos are worth sharing with you. Even though some of these images are sad and harrowing, I take comfort in them. They remind me that people are inherently compassionate and caring. I hope you draw strength from them, too. All images by The Associated Press in New Orleans, Biloxi and the rural Gulf Coast.“
because god doesn’t always have the best god damned plans, does he?
And so we taste the seeds of sewn discontent. I was out with Matthew this evening. I saw Ryan off at the airport, he walked across the street like a traveler from the old world into the new. Goodbye to everything but a statue of liberty. I told his father that I felt as if we should have tattered his coat, but then thought that it was exactly right just the way it was. This gives me what I need as much as he always does. There was a bomb scare at Metrotown today. play the piano for me. I stood outside and looked up at the black towers, imagining orange billowing out, glass smashing into the sidewalk at my feet.
I left him, my Matthew, on the train almost after midnight. The presence of my thought, I could feel it beginning to sink into the skin of my heart. He left me, I left him. They’re words. I’m afraid a part of me will always be waiting. It’s a good fear, the flee-fight reaction that bolts me upright in unfamiliar beds. He stood in front of me and I looked a little closer. His hair is longer but the mannerisms are the same. He quotes instead of knowing how to speak. He tears my world apart. I was waiting for a miracle, and then the end days came. Before we began, it was timing that did us in. Timing and his youth holding so tenaciously to places that I haven’t seen in myself in years. It will take a long time to forget how to hurt, but as I’m sorry that there’s no simple things to say, I’m also wanting to be glad that I’m not as shallow as I sometimes suspect. This year has been good to me in perhaps that respect. I know that my motives are exactly as I perceive them to be. I’m young and think love is paramount, and I like it that way. There is a deathgrip on substance standing over illusion, and my version of romance savours simple facts and dedication. It’s as it should be, no matter how much pain it’s been giving me. Strawberries are what the young should live off, what we should carry closer. Bite the sun or you’re simply taking up space the rest of us could be using.
We eventually sat on the stairs of the courthouse, just like everyone else does here. It’s a place to have it out in privacy without taking the other person home. There’s darkness shrouding everything and yet enough light to see by drifting in from nearby buildings. There’s skyline to stare at, and water, and trees. Details that capture the eye and allow the conversation to wander. It’s important, that wander, that description into meta that creates an emotion check, that creates the proper distraction to bring things closer. Often what I said wasn’t much, but was hurtful. The truth is my weapon, it cuts like nothing else can. It was understood, the depth of my attack describes the enormity of my reaction. It’s not being volatile, it’s reining back what I want to do, what I want to say. There’s been too much waiting to find these things out, I can cry again. Forgiveness will come for some of the things, though likely never all of them. Deception is a big red button, the distrust bomb waiting to annihilate everything that went before. I go through my days deriving optimism from pragmatic descriptions of the present. It’s not positive, but it’s enough to live off. It’s enough that I can still put my arm in his to walk down the street. I can adjust.
I’ve said before that there are no heroes for me to follow now, but I want to say that I can draw figures on my soul instead. I can draw lines of respect and honour, I can steal voices that speak wisdom and inscribe lessons inside my body with them, I can learn and I can be holy and I can be more than the literary definition of the ghost inside deux ex machina. However, it’s going to take time. More time than has passed, for this wound shattered my sacred into dust. Against usual expectations, not mine, but I’m sure some of yours, more contact will help me. My anger is at betrayal, at falsehood, at taking me with him when he fell, when his wings were wrenched from his back by a picketing god. Grabbing the root by the stem is the first step to preparing a salve. My flight can be returned to me. My depression is action based, an ocean of reaction that I can eventually drink.
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.
we’ll all float on all right
Two days and two misapprehensions. Happy birthday Chris, you’re twenty-four now. I think that’s to mean something, but for the life of me, I don’t know what. Have this link, at least, it’s word heroin. It’s been a hard spring, burning into a difficult summer. There’s redemption somewhere, we just have to figure out where to find it. I’m sitting in my home, armo(u)ring myself with unlikely colours, with the strength I have in my body that a writer gave to me. I am hoping that if harm befalls me, if my heart stops, if he is there, it will set my blood to boil and I will flower into flame and burn again. Twist my hair around my finger and speak some magic words that will lighten the weights that drag my feet from dancing again.
I’m not allowed to love you. It’s the same script, all over again. Audience of one. The evening is just beginning and I’m thinking of brake-lights, red glow into the distance. How cars will trail in long snakes through the mountains away from here. The freeways of L.A. were like that, incredible embers speeding past and forward and always going, just going, flying between yellow lines and white. There, however, without a vehicle of my own, I was lost, a child trying to catch up with little tiny steps. My legs were tied, my sight unable to see unless I was near the ocean. Here there is water, there are mountains, there are miles filled entirely with trees. In a way, it’s a cage all the same. I’m tired of it, I’ve done this place. My precious people, I want to shake their roots free of dirt and set them walking our of here with me. I’m glad James got away.
Navi is asleep in my bed and Ryan‘s out fetching supplies for SinCity tonight. I’m alone with a rabbit and a ferret, though they’re kept separate now. We’ve found proof positive that rabbits are genetically food for ferrets. It won’t matter if they’ve seen one before or even know what to do with one, it will try to drag it away and eat it. The rabbit, Kitty, has escaped unscathed, but perhaps not so me. Now I know Skatia can attempt to be sneaky, I want to see it again. Again, the thought occurs to me to fetch him a mouse from the shop to have.
nostalgia parade in barefeet on broken glass
Summer is beginning to end, just yesterday it was possible to taste fall creeping into the weather, and yet to me, it’s still spring. My run of bad luck began then, and there I have stayed, foolishly expecting a shift in happenstance to accompany the weather. It’s basic and slightly animistic of me, perhaps. As if the world might lick my wounds with sunshine.
Ellen is leaving us, moving her family eight hours away. Her children, Kevin, Brin and Maz, are my godchildren. They call me aunt sometimes, or mum when they’re not thinking about it. I’ve known them for such a long time it hurts to think about. I’ve watched them develop personalities and grow into decent human beings from mewling toddlers, backlit by their amazing mother. Being with them makes me happy, they’re family in such a basic sense that it goes beyond friends. I’m already scheming a road trip to visit them. There’s going to be a huge gathering at their new place for Thanksgiving, Max’s second birthday. It’s a camp out deal, tents piched on thier four acres of backyard.
My reactions seem so far away from my body lately, voices are quiet, touch is remote. Everything is mild, as if I’ve grown a new layer of skin, one made of thick lucite. I feel like a widower not yet ready to crave life again, instead still lying on the coffin or holding my corpse husband’s hand in a brightly lit room. He slept here. I’ve been sifting through my memories, holding them up to my inner eye and trying to understand where things went so sideways. I remember standing, vibrating with the first anger I’d had in years. How could you? I remember standing, my body molten honey, my hands unable to stop pulling him into me. His hair, his voice. Feeling like this was just right. What have I done? I don’t dream at night anymore. I won’t allow it. I’ve thrown down my gallows, soon maybe I’ll remember how to breathe. I’ll stand up out of the dust and wipe my hands on my trousers, readying myself to walk back home. I don’t understand how you can love me so much You’re persuasive, now I don’t either.
I want a long walk off a short plank. An unexpected drop off to give me my catalyst, three months has been and gone, too long, too long. SinCity is this Saturday and I don’t know if dancing is finally going to help. My spirit wants to fly out past the edges of the cliffs that hem this city at the ocean and just keep going, out until my arms can’t help me swim anymore. Except for a brief period when I had emotional support from Matthew, I haven’t had a good week since the beginning of May, since I came back from Toronto. I think that I have friends who understand not to press me, who are kind enough not to force me to care. I’m thankful. I don’t want to call anyone on the telephone, I don’t want to leave this apartment alone. I got as far as the park today before breaking down, falling by the side of the road, a crumpled excuse for a small girl. I want a voice that I can’t trust to call me and apologize, explain, but I know that life doesn’t work so well, it doesn’t reach down a hand from over the prison wall so easily. This dream is an everyday agony.
“You said you would show me another country, and you have. It’s right here, in me.”
There was flying yesterday. I opened my eyes in Reine’s bed, not having slept at all. Karen and Patrick were downstairs with her mother. Ten minutes later, we were driving. Smooth ska on the stereo, too early for people to be aware. Up Victoria, up fourty-first, taking the bridge past the airport and out onto highway. I held my breath through the tunnel and wished I could remember how not to be wounded. I let it out half way, feeling empty and futile. A child thought, how hollow they make these places. The way the music played made me think of movies, of black pvc.
The plane was small, familiar. Fuselage white, pale as they always are in such places. Karen and Reine looked like headset angels. I rode in front, co-pilot pretender. Once I took the handles, but all I did was steer on course, something anyone could have done. It dragged to the left, heavy somehow so far above the earth. We flew to the airport outside of Victoria, touching down and lifting back up without pause. I held my hands out with my camera on top and said, “do you think we can do it?” to Patrick. Zero gravity, it lifted and fell upward, my fingers cradled under it as it swooped for the windscreen and I could feel my hair twisting away from my scalp, it was beautiful. Enough to unknot my eyes, to pry open my muscles enough to move.
Light seems different when you’re flying, like above the clouds there’s a different texture. I thought of marbles, cats eyes glittering, and agates, how I dearly wanted to walk back in time and say, “teach me now, not later, before you make mistakes.” I wanted twin handfuls of them, glass smooth and clear. I wanted them to spill and fall into the ocean beneath me, a mystery to any witnesses as much as my relationships. I miss him, of course I do. His hands hold my heart still, that burning thing. Blood, however, has left me barren. Think of burned houses, only the shell and metal remaining. Let my honour be my unwarped steel. Picture red hair and eyes like blue quick silver. My strawberry heart is useless, obviously, or else I would be able to stop my crying. I could return it home and let it flutter back into my breast like a nesting bird.
I have a doctors appointment this afternoon. A question asked of me demands it. The other women are likely wonderful people, but.
I remember trust.
because I think it’s time to say it
This week has been insulating, my heart too bruised for anything but a cotton wool retreat. Reina and Ryan have been mild life-savers, smiling circles floating on waves. Underneath my feet I can’t bear to see, though I should look. Matthew is coming back this week or the next.
Apparently he’s been fucking around again. Not only on me this time, but a couple of others.
Welcome to the lie, ladies. Take a number.
Matthew called and my heart stopped
Fields of fire that passed the train
The sky is victorious but here comes the rain
Friday is taking me home again,
And I’ve nothing but you on my mind.
Grass is greener without the pain,
I think that I’m changing but I’m just the same
My sun is ascending again
And I’ve nothing but you on my mind
Sometimes I feel like I’m glad to be free,
Sometimes I still want your arms around me,
Sometimes I’m glad to have left you behind,
The Crazy English Summer has put you back on my mind.
Life’s a riot, a lover, a friend,
Pity the day that it has to end
Friday come speed me home again,
I’ve nothing but you on my mind.
Sometimes I feel like i’m fine on my own,
Fifty thousand miles from home.
Sometimes I’m weak and the past is my guide,
Summer returns and puts you back on my mind.
I’ve been out of charactor today, but would like to mark for the record that I blame the eye-liner
St Peters wolf is hunting me, licking at my traces on other peoples skin. My nails ask for defenses back please, they ask for water to drain from my eyes somewhere not in public. I saw today that someone’s referred to me as an ex, and when night falls, that’s what it feels like, though I know it only as a convenient term that explains really nothing of what happened or what might have been. He kissed me, you know, when he shouldn’t have. I understand deeply, like standing under trees, that there’s been a fundamental shift, that I forced myself to remember that I am a star collapsing. In waking to myself, I had to be alone of this one, this gold skein mannerism. Otherwise, when my heart was beating, it would be a violence, a darkening room without a coloured door.
Amusing to me, I realize as I write this that I’m wearing a stolen ring. Usually a sign of solidarity, this time it means a freedom in vocabulary, it means someone I feel quick enough to keep up with. These round celtic knots tied one into the next, this band, this loop, I’m twisting it around my finger. Metal there feels right, the flesh feels righted, but the implications, the loose ties of acquaintance versus friendship, they nag at me with a peculiar fascination. In my mind, there’s something waking. A fierce creature with steady cravings, I can’t see it, though I feel it growing restless. What it is I’m uncertain, something to do with words, with expression.
Yesterday was long, a golden musical chairs of people in and out. It began merely an hour after returning from Beth’s delightful house-warming. Navi was over in the morning, and Ryan, with James visiting in the afternoon. We went to dinner with my mother, Vicki, and her father, John, at Wild Ginger. My first time meeting my granda as an adult. It was, shall we say, illuminating. He reminded me that I’m a quarter gypsy, which is something I had almost forgotten, but that we are related to the highest placed mafia family in Canada. This is especially delightful considering that I’ve finally discovered what it is he does. It was rather surprising. I knew that he used to be a salesman of sorts but I was entirely unaware that currently my granda is a bootlegging gigolo. I swear, my family only gets better. The best part? He’s a British Citizen, has been for thirty+ years. A landed immigrant back in the day when bombs still fell in first world countries. The way the laws are, that means that so am I. When I get my passport, depending on how soon I reapply, then it just might not be Canadian. (So anyone I asked to marry for citizenship, if you’re still interested, you’re going to have to supply another interesting country or two).