Tag: relationships

hold the wheel



Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

I saw you and looked down. I changed the subject of conversation. You walked past like silver, as if I could touch the air you had just walked through and feel solid flesh.

I counted my lovers the other day, using myself as one unit. My body, my bended bones and muscles, an abacus bead. Click, like this, and he slipped in here and my back arched taut, hips drawing the strings of shiva’s bow. She bit me once, hard, at the bus-stop, one of the first times we kissed. I’m at twelve consensual, my friend at thirty-four. I thought about water falling, how many times I’ve held hands in rain. The contrast of skin colours, how I loved to see my white against the wood colours of tanned skin, how I loved the white of my skin matching the belly that I kissed. I would like to meet a boy this time who wants things I’ve never thought of, tells me the secret names of roses, tells me that he likes touching me in public. I would like to not be shot through with sacrifice.

There’s a girl sitting alone in a room, her music is as lonely as she is and she can’t find anything else. Her clothes are piled on the floor among too many books and papers. She’s scared.

Newly minted life, that’s another thing coming. Bill and I were talking about technology the other day after fireworks, and I felt for the first time in a long time that I was aware, like I’d been roughly shaken from a trance. He argued that new things weren’t that, only the newest illustration of an age-old idea. I pointed out that new species only come from previous iterations of animal, that everything comes from somewhere. The system self-propagating. The New finding you because you’ve put the settings that way. I know enough for two of us. The trick is in the procedure, the knowing how to act with it, the finding out what to do next. I feel distinctly unintelligent because I have so many tools, so many pieces of information, yet no ideas.

I like the hydrocarbons


Lisa 459
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

if you mix an acid and a base, you get salt

Life lately has been slightly less than hectic and at best a distraction. War has raged back and forth over the hours of every day I’ve been awake. Ryan put me to sleep earlier today, a blessing, one hand on my head like an affectionate priest. Half an hour to clear my head. Fireworks and fireworks, it’s been a western world meets east things-are-eyes-averted two weeks. I look in the mirror and I see a face that looks like it’s been minutely sewn to a skull. I was fired on Friday You’re a creative person, and I’m sure elsewhere you will go far. It was a little speech, she walked up to my desk, said, “this is close enough” then control room said LAUNCH. Her black hair is pretty, but her smile is not as frequent as mine. My reading outpaces, a personality conflict, multi-tasking apparently a sign of inattention. As I walked away I thought, “This has been just as long as a theatre run, this has been a show.”

the core of the earth is a molten ball of lead

Saturday before last, I went similarly to the fireworks site. No change in confidence, but with a settled step, accepting the ground I was pacing. I arrived smiling. A steady walk in unfamiliar boots, all of this looked familiar, I knew what I could do and how much I needed to learn. Jay looked me over, we hadn’t seen each other in a while, our interactions being defined by fire and firewater and neither being a matter of course anymore, and his eyes checked for boots, but stuck at my throat. “I can’t believe you’re wearing jewelry.”

core of my earth is molten : my thyroid gland is a fire-engine : my earth is molten

There was a hawk that circled the site for hours, it snapped open its great wings against the bright gray sky and looked down at us and our trestles as if considering prey. Later the sun burned off the clouds, banishing both the prospect of rain or a decent temperature. The reflected sun off the water and sand was dreadful, a burning reminder that the bright thing in the sky is made of fusion. We stripped off our shirts by mid-day and danced with conversation, touching upon everything internet terrible. Linda Lee, ostensibly one of the more experienced pyrotechs, wasn’t as internet literate as the rest of us and it left her laughing in shock as we continued to up the edgy. She had a wonderful guessed definition of slashfic that went beyond irony somewhere into painfully appropriate.

I love you

No one took pictures of my miniature inferno.

for a girl named A


Automatic Sadness
Originally uploaded by
seejackrun.

When you turn your face, I see the most beautiful girl underneath invisible scars. There are lines there, drawn in an ink that’s never been put to paper, tracing everything you’ve ever seen, everything you care to remember and some things you don’t. When you turn your head and smile, the maps crinkle in the corner of your eyes like secrets that kings lost before history was written down on anything but flesh and I smile back, because yes, that’s exactly how that song used to go, back when we were smaller and less aware of fear. You have the name of the only girl who was ever nice to me in grade seven. I don’t think it matters, but I thought you would like to know.

When you hold your hand to the light, I see a dancer there, poised with rhythm and waiting for the exact moment to drop her handkerchief, eyes smiling at the irony of it all. The bones are soaked with vitality and glow through only where they should, rather than before, when they did not, when they were apparent. Knuckles white, knuckles kissed, it’s all the same after. You’re loved and should know it. The form and frame are balanced, a painting waiting to be found under an old student whitewash.

I want to write about it, but don’t have time at work

Sing a song of six-pence, a stalkers field of rye. Sing a little ditty to make the dreary time go by. I need the wings of an angel, a time lapse photography animated batch of holy heaven flying, crooked and slightly too green. My mind is full of pop lyric lines, music video cuts and quick symmetry photography. Just when I needed it beyond all things, I have passed on my light and the next morning I still had gunpowder in my hair, I could smell it. Saturday was the first day in a very long time with any real distraction.

It’s a pity that even through all of this, I can still call on iron. I can’t explain how close I was to being addressed.

another day of making busy

Habit carries with it consistancy, a reliable fall back of behaviour traits, how like all my friends have begun using pet names without even considering it. Darling and Dear falling from lips in accordance to our norm but not the public. Honey, meaningless without the bee-sting of kisses. When such mouths touch, there should be pull from the centre of being. Should the habit. Black robes and white wimples, it’s a thought, an outward exclamation point of my personal state.

Andrew and Navi are making together a very sweet couple. I’m glad they’ve found each other in the myriad crowding of our friends. I wonder who’s next sometimes, as if my parties are the bouquet thrown by a bride. The upcoming omen of somebody getting laid a bit more regularly. Relationships are topical, a point form reference that I’m beginning to pay attention less to. Stop dominating the conversation. I want to remember that there’s a world out there. That as I sit at my desk, a million people are laughing.

London had another day of Pfft Terror. The best news quote yet has been, “It was a minor explosion but enough to blow open his rucksack. … The man who was holding the rucksack looked extremely dismayed.” Somehow that sums it up nicely. (Thank you smogo for finding that one).

In other news, the FDA has approved placing shock treatment implants into peoples brains to combat depression. A generator the size of a pocket watch is implanted into the chest. Wires snake up the neck to the vagus nerve, delivering tiny electric shocks through that nerve and into a region of the brain thought to play a role in mood. I particularly like the last bit, “Deaths have been reported among some epilepsy patients who have a VNS implant, but Schultz said there was no sign of increased deaths in the depression study.”

where (are/you)

I thought I was in a relationship, but in the last week, everything special has wound out of patience. It’s let go of the rope and what I feel is falling out. I’ve been remembering stories about immortality, about when the gods walked among the mortals of the earth. Two children waited in the dark outside the door, they went inside and saw candles, stars, quick bright flames and steady burning embers. They were lives, every soul upon the earth shining, visible because it was time for them to choose thier own. One chose the faster burning bright and the other chose the dreaming warmth that continued for thrice as long, (it’s always three in the stories, but you know this.)

I want a catalyst, a defining moment of this can no longer be, and so far what I’ve found is a damning silence. A caught grabbed tear the cloth with my fingernails phone-call with no content, that was last week, one day short of a week. Not enough to live off, not enough to find my way into having a being again. I said I would not write the first letter, not throw away my needs anymore for desire, for the elemental grief that’s the only available trade. I stand by what I said. I stand by my differences in thought, my basic requirements of contact and breathing.

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.

forgive me if I want to chew out your eyes


Photo from Underground
Originally uploaded by Frankie Roberto.

Yesterday was a long test of my breaking points, from every trying direction. An exercise in self immolation. I had put all my energy into preparing to put Matthew on a plane, I had nothing more. The bomb blast in London was not as shattering an event as it’s perpetrators were perhaps hoping for, (nice of them to choose a date which makes sense both sides of the water, I thought, very considerate), but they have managed to wash our increasingly small world with justified concern.

At work I checked my e-mail, the early morning having been spent on a death grip attempt to hold onto my last vestiges of restful sleep then by airport checks, is this going to delay his flight? Change his flight? and was informed that an old friend had died. A pilot from Hope had a heart attack and didn’t make it. He was a good man, watching out for Marrissa and I when we were much younger and more liable to sneak off to the other end of the airfield at night to watch the stars fall down and sip at Chetan’s family stash of Sweet Cherabim apple cider. I’ve been absent there for a long time, several years now, but I’d known him since I was ten.

The next letter was worse, a discovery of trust violated. There were other things in my in-box, a few girlish letters I was happy about, I’m pen-pal-ing someone like I promised, and that’s pleasant, but they were all overwhelmed by one tiny note. I had to excuse myself, leave my desk and sit instead on the floor of the lavatory with my head on my knees. The day I put my love on the plane should not be the day my trust base is assassinated, but it was.

This was where I began to be disturbed at my ability for composure, at how quickly I’m able to simply eat what’s hurting me and continue, as the day before was less than great as well. In fact, every week lined up since the beginning of May has had tiny shattering disasters scattered about within it. I’m half as worried about myself as what’s been going on, because I’ve no clue what to do with stress. I’ve no one I may talk with, no hobby that vents anything. No outlet. At first it was tucked away in small corners of my mind, goading me to cry when I was tired and alone, then I began to find it in my body, I would tap on things and flick my fingers, pressing my hands into fists and releasing them over and over. Now, I don’t even know now. My teeth are stones, my tongue contains acid, and I am so very careful not to let it show. Someone said the other day that I’m going to die of machismo, and they might be right, but I don’t know any other way. I only want my hands to stop shaking.

I was controlled by the time Sandi came to pick me from work. We made small talk successfully in the car on our way to Matthew and I even managed to laugh a little when we arrived. He was packed, his entire life in a giant black suitcase open in the middle of the floor. The rest of the apartment looked exactly as it always does, a hotel room set-up with a futon instead of a bed, all the personal touches looking committee approved. Even under the crushing weight of Matthew’s departure, I was glad to leave.

The airport was simply that. A hiatus place, where the food is merely something to do until enough time has passed and the people aren’t real, but props with which to make meaningless conversation. I’ve kissed three people goodbye there now, though never when I myself was leaving, only when I was being left behind while they continued their lives without me. he’s been here too Part of the reason why I haven’t applied for my passport again is that I know if I have one, I won’t say goodbye and leave through the doors, instead I will walk up to a counter, any counter, and buy the cheapest ticket possible rather than return to Vancouver proper. That’s dangerous behaviour and it’s good to have a yoke for it.

A baggage handler smiled at me fondly when I saw Matthew off. He looked over and you could read in his face that he thought we were sweet, our kisses seen with nostalgia. I wanted to hit him, but instead I turned away. I found something to take with me from the kiosks, a tradition of mine to keep balance, a mental koan of departure, and caught buses back to the office.

After that was my first day of work at the chocolate shop.

I was half an hour late but my supervisor decided to mark me down as on time anyway, my co-workers are the most friendly people I’ve ever worked with, (if a shop were to be run by the people who stay at global backpackers hostels, that might be similar), I must have had a quarter pound of chocolate and a half pint of ice-cream and gelati, rounding it off on my way home with a frozen chocolate dipped nanimo bar, and I still came home depressed.

The next five weeks are going to be long.
I wish I knew how to let people be nice to me.

time field happen on

When I was a child:
Running in the night,
Afraid of what might be

Hiding in the dark,
Hiding in the street,
And of what was following me…

Now hounds of love are hunting.
I’ve always been a coward,
And I don’t know what’s good for me.

Here I go.
It’s coming for me through the trees.
Help me, someone,
Help me, please.

Take my shoes off,
And throw them in the lake,
And I’ll be
Two steps on the water.

I found a fox
Caught by dogs.
He let me take him in my hands.

His little heart,
It beats so fast,
And I’m ashamed of running away

From nothing real–
I just can’t deal with this,
But I’m still afraid to be there,

Among your hounds of love,
And feel your arms surround me.
I’ve always been a coward,
And never know what’s good for me.

Oh, here I go!
Don’t let me go!
Hold me down!
It’s coming for me through the trees.
Help me, darling,
Help me, please!

Take my shoes off
And throw them in the lake,
And I’ll be
Two steps on the water.

I don’t know what’s good for me.
I don’t know what’s good for me.
I need your love love love love love, yeah!
Your love!

Take your shoes off
And throw them in the lake!

Do you know what I really need?
Do you know what I really need?
I need love love love love love, yeah

My Lover’s leaving this week and I’m a little bit scared that my heart won’t be as stable as I need it to be. There’s been so much waiting to even find myself where I am, a place where I feel like I can finally love this man without endeavoring to make myself small. The noun turning into verb, the cards laid levelly on the table. I’m so good at keeping everything contained, what will happen when I don’t have a constant reminder that I need? My job is a welcome distraction, something new, but not anything that can go home with me. That might be what I require. Something to keep me from sitting alone, counting inhalation after exhalation, the number of times I blink in a minute.

I don’t know what anyone reading this must think this is, what all the waiting has been about. I can only say that it should be worth it, if even only for a year. I’ve been careful without thinking, my respect paramount, and I have no idea if anyone knows the situation who does not directly know me. My regions of thinking aren’t apparently clear in these words that spill from my fingers to warm this moniter lit field. People like it that way, when they’re mentioned, when I’m writing this to them, but sometimes I would dearly like to break. Toss in names and situations that have been eating me away. Explain why I carry this ridiculous sadness, why I pretend not to be secretive about cradling pain within myself.

Sometimes a melody will draw from me something deep, a line of sunlight that cores in my arteries and forces me to go search for open air. Find some friends and explore where we’ve never been. It’s harder to do here, we have to go so much farther afield to simply find a direction that we haven’t memorized. The exercise, when successful, leaves you lost and discovering, trying to find the nearest village name in the hopes of something to eat that isn’t highway sign fast food. With temerity, we may even leave the country, switch the colour of our money for a monochrome green printed with less interesting faces. When I see a plane fly overhead, I think that the people captive inside that little machine know freedom more than I do.

Princesses dancing beneath the castle, shoes worn out every night. I was always a little jealous of those seven girls, seven nights. I am invisible, stuck in the middle, a strange drag on the boat. Again, the feel of pale stones against my teeth. I could spit them like teeth, pearly and scraped by a thousand words but instead I leave them in, swallow them clicking down my throat to rest in my belly. They can whisper there, abrading my tensions with a heavy dusk weight, grinding them down into poison that’s easier to digest into fury. Noise isn’t what I’m asking for. I want meaning to flower into splendour here, analyzed into fractal machines and the percentages of smiles versus tears, wet cheeks in rain on a sunny day.

Blood thudding in my veins. I’m going to feel so empty at the airport, just like last time and the time after that. They’re always the same, escalators and railings. Potted plants that are carefully fake, not even silk and ruined when they get wet. Signs that have been bleached blue by daily wear, left over from the seventies, when all these places were made. The big travel boom, when suddenly the globe was seen as that. When Paris was still romantic and no one here had been to Prague. I always watch until it’s time to walk away, the realization dawning that I never know where to go from there. The day should be different, something incalculable has just changed, but it’s always the same. The day spins, weaving a night and fraying into a new morning, never minding that I am without a set figure of “you”. Past participle sleeping, past and passed and the day is exactly like yesterday. No one notices.

Distraction is about to become more precious. Black leather pants and he’s not my type at all. He’s thickly built and lacks grace in his language, it’s unnerving. He doesn’t dance with me but it doesn’t seem to matter. He carries my deepest sleep in his washed hands, cupped palms full of sand that keep me mercifully above water. My skin doesn’t care that he doesn’t wait, that he doesn’t speak what it asks for. My energy can’t crackle until that happens, but somewhere there’s a key. It fits into the lock and turns stage left. I’ve seen it happen with closed eyes and an arched back. Lightning caught in a gasped breath and my hands trapped in hair. Artists will tell you that it’s all in the wrists.

starlight on fire

Running underneath every train of thought are rails spun entirely from unknown quantifiers. Perceptions as metal shining blind to the horizon. I find there’s an imaginary border between hypothesis and knowing, one I don’t know how to measure. My mind takes the substance there and fashions it into flowers that drop from my lips, the blessing curse of the youngest daughter, and I hold them up to light, examine the colours for clues, but I’m not always satisfied. I want to plunge my finger into the center of them and taste the idea pollen living there. It’s intimidating, this habit, like living with angels aiding my foot-step tongue or pre-determination haranguing me daily to hang in there when events turn too stressful. Occasionally, I am appalled by how much I take for granted, how much understanding of the world I assume. I used to be uncomfortable with the entire concept, that the unconscious flow moments of big-picture recognition that are sublimated inside me somewhere represent an axiomatic system of balance. Every day I expected to realize that the patterns were only hyperbole moments of tying moments together conveniently enough for belief to kick in, (there’s a word for it that William Gibson is fond of, but it escapes me at the moment), but every year has been proving me wrong. Over and over again I’ve been justified in my unwritten understanding of the underlying motivations in various aspects of inter-person relationships. It’s almost tiring.

Certainly, it’s also been occurring to me that if a person walks around with enough self-confidence, people become willing to bend around them and so the same effect is achieved though through a different channel. This is, however, too irritating to consider. I tend to discount anything that regards my social circles in such low esteem however ego filled such a statement must seem. It’s sort of an automatic assumption that in spite of the fact that most of us are odd in some way, we have ourselves sorted to a healthy point, a mind-set place where outside requirements are nothing more than they should be and that validation comes as much from within as without.