Tag: relationships

I am still smiling randomly on the street, I am trying not to wear my memories thin


the sound of your absence
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

It’s been discovered oral sex leads to throat cancer.

I wear a pin that carries a last kiss from a common name on the lid of my eye, around my neck coils a scarf that brought my fluttering wings back to life, my wallet is camouflage for how much I still love him, it lives in my witty black bag, the stain of two infidelities. I am armoured, the only one who can break my heart. Pieces and parts, twisting my hands in the sink, water running red, the lesson of a clothed walk through life. Things, how little of them are mine. Of course I want more, to have their voices rise with mine again, to create a rhythm of easy conversation, the happy patina of bitten tongues and worlds beyond words, but these are what I have; the way I wear my pocket watch on my wrist and cradled in the palm of my hand, my ear against the door of the sky, my permanently borrowed hat always the word No. There is no cavalry.

I leave the room, hear behind me, “she’s my brothers girlfriend.” remember to write. My surprise is mechanical. Shelter. I rest my head on his shoulder, let the flesh give substance to a ghost, and settle in.

What is passive? This is my kit, the way I wear a skirt, lipstick, stockings, the way I shift my hips against a close explosion or brace my feet when I swing to defend myself. Nothing to be scared of. The angles of these faces, lighting up on a street corner, attached sweetly to my memory, wear quietly. Composers, compositors, blocks of personal mythology, barely attached, like birds fluttering along a wire. I have never laughed so much in my life.

like hearts swelling

Betty Hutton, once the favourite doll of Hollywood.

Transparent as sound, we are pieces of the human engine out of old mythology, pet children decanted from bottles of blood. After the boy is blown from this city, I will stand alone by the side of the road, and even if he does not look back before walking through the gate, my legs will continue to hold me up, I will continue to breathe.

That was always the worst lesson, that I will remain alive in my chemicals, wrapped in nerve endings, a collective rumbling of infintismals, (creaks, exhalations, needs), no matter how much my offerings to the gates have been smashed. The modern world is very bad at silence – cities do not hold their breath except in the moment before a bomb falls – but there are occasionally words I feel I should almost kneel to speak.

I’d like to say our first kiss was a special thing, a low slung howl of discovery, but it’s never been like that. That road’s been washed out, (if there was ever order there), replaced by brittle grass made straw in the sun, such-a-shame at-so-young-an-age blame-yet-another-hotel-room-romance damn-those-older-men. I almost don’t care anymore. Instead I count first glances, first realizations, that pause between what I know now and what I knew then. What is more important? The date we met or the amperage of comfortable electricity that ran through my fingers the first time I touched the middle of his back with bare skin?

The proud cities I have built with people, some of them are still standing, giant proud machines of words that circle the globe like air currents of what colour my hair, how long this correspondence, I had a show, they had a child, no, yes, you can’t come visit now. We are stories, novels, little threads in vast pleasing shapes. None of my relationships have been film-noir construction kits. We meet in cynical places badly lit, smoke cigarettes we take from small cases. This is just another connection, another spirit made flesh in the network. All we’re missing is the small confession of where we were the morning of September 11th, year 2001.

This morning he was beautiful, a misplaced dream left over from 1985. Sitting on the bed to put on his boots like having Lost Boys on the record player; leather jacket, long hair, I used to clean my saddest house to that soundtrack album. No one wears slimmer dark blue jeans. In my head, “I like my body when it is with your body” and the memory of his eyes flickering from mine to my hands on my stockings like they do under his lids when he’s dreaming, conversation not missing a beat. This is our generation gap, that I can write this here, display my day, my meaning, my worth. I grew up here, on-line. He didn’t.

I can barely believe how much I still want to go back to L.A.

One of these days, I’m going to have to learn to find a home.

but I was given a free fruit protein smoothie today, so that’s alright

Think William Gibson knows about this?


my little tanith
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

“A screaming comes across the sky…” Gravity’s Rainbow again, Pynchon as one of my favourite authors. Paul lent it to me, the sweet pig-tailed man who juggles as he walks, months ago as part of a thick stack, bricks of book to help build a delicious wall of post-modernism beside my bed. Now enough time has passed that I am feeling the pressure of their weight every time I leave the house without them. Except for this last novel, they require returning. Given another set of circumstances, I would not be so concerned, but I can sense myself putting it off out of a stunted sense of self-preservation. There’s no casual way to be certain that Marc would not be the one to answer the door. I would have my past be a silent thing. There does not seem enough good in it to be worth preserving so carefully. It is not fair that my heart jumps so suddenly with his name.

The Wisdom of Children.

I do not like my memory acting as a ghost haunted, falsely fate-ridden private universe. I rather my hurts decompose, fold back into my experiences instead of corrode them, but cannot seem to find the trick. It has abandoned me completely. Instead I find myself withdrawing, attempting to find a social array where these emotionally catastrophic people do not so immediately exist, which doesn’t actually help at all. I suppose part of it is that I’m too busy trying to create a theatre through sheer force of will to concentrate on anything more private. Still, it nags me. That pile of books, however saturated with kindness, remains a constant reminder of circumstances that my wounded my well being – a Damocles sword that fell without a feast waiting (or even a table).

The Smithsonian Institution pleads poverty while Smithsonian Secretary used Smithsonian funds to decorate his house.

knots, because Jay is a sweet curmudgen

His skin is lighter than mine where the sun doesn’t touch, though we’re multi-racial enough to get us lynched in certain places, (we know he has problems at the border). I can see in the dark how the outline of my wrist – you know this story. I know this story. I will never get enough of his clever mind, his smile, or his hair, but it slipped from my mouth that the latest death.pool bet says he’ll run off with his employer next. I mistakenly used the word “cheat” before demurring that I know he is only as committed as a cat offered a dish of cream. I know the ending already, the cotton candy clouds blow away in a predictable wind. Last time I bled myself dry and then moved to another part of the country. It didn’t change anything.

Another story – The clock is heaped with minutes that need to be folded and placed into drawers. Fragments of conversation, of laughter like honey in my throat, of shared yearning after mystery. I am made of clay and I can feel in the dark how the shape of my body fits surprisingly into his (as it crumbles into dust). Everywhere are tiny, running wolves disguised as mice. On the blackboard, my name has been erased. I am a self-portrait, stars for eyes, blindfolded. His skin belongs to someone else. The sheets describe pacing, the threads worn where the line was drawn. Thou Shalt, not. The pillow tells quietly of the hollow curve of a braincase. I didn’t belong there any more than I do elsewhere, but at least it felt safe. There was water in a cup on one side of the bed.

I wonder if when I am older, I will place a cup there too, as they do, these men, these ten minute husbands who deprive me of stability. I don’t like their common habits. I want all of their mistakes to be different, they should continue to be separate creatures in as many things as possible.

My New Year hasn’t started yet. I feel, instead, that I was on the set of a film shooting a scene about New Years Eve. How else to explain where I was, who I was with? Surrey? What? I came home today soaked to the cells of my marrow from working many hours in the rain. Work began at five, where I was on gate. Somewhere around midnight, I assumed my way backstage and made myself available. After the count-down and the fireworks, my time was spent hauling about heavy bits of everything. Work was tear down, strike, a rush of blood to the lungs. The skin of my hands has been polished so raw my nerves are misfiring in interesting ways, I might have split my lip and possibly cracked a rib. Sleep was a couple of sheepish hours in a hotel room, too early in the morning to be morning yet. Then we worked again. This time in a gradual and persistent downpour. Tents had to be puzzled down, missing pieces had me to be made to fit into trucks and lamentably weighty slabs of steel needed to be dragged from one end of the complex to the other. Same with sandbags. I cannot explain how much I dislike sandbags, except to say that sometimes being female’s a bit of a bitch.

(It’s always a bit of a toss-up between letting people be nice to me and accepting the easier, indoor “nice” jobs or going out in the crappy weather and attempting to prove myself a little more to a group of strangers who all assume me to be capable anyway. Mostly I took the indoor jobs and didn’t mind when people called me “sweetie”. They can call me “sweetie” as much as they like as long as they follow orders.)

I might sound like I’m complaining, but really I love this stuff. I chose being on crew over any of the parties I was invited to. (Is it just me or was everyone really slap-dash about plans this year?) I appreciate being useful, as well as chances to constructively use basic physics. (What, you think I can heft things twice my weight without the stuff?) The best part is that apparently I’m to be paid for my hours, which is nice, as I would have been out there anyway. Just tattoo geek on my forehead in invisible ink.

to the man with the hands, this isn’t directed at you at all

Things That Make Me Feel Better About My Business Plan #23.

There is a thing that men do that I like. They place their hands directly on my hips, thumbs across my belly, as if to make a frame for my body as something they appreciate as beautiful. None of the women I’ve been with have ever done this. It seems an action restricted to gender or gender roles. The girls I’ve been with were very much girls. They had me lead when we danced, they would put their hand into mine. It didn’t matter that I was younger and my tongue stumbled. I had to be taller, I had to be stronger. Puzzling over this difference this morning, this small, tiny thing, I remembered today how, when I was a gymnast gunning for the circus, my class would practise handstands on each other’s hips. A completely different thing, but with almost the same placement of fingers and palms. Such a small thing, such a tiny thing.

Postmarks now has a permanent home on the web at http://takemewithyou.org.

It’s my surprise that it remains a nice gesture that catches in my mind and keeps my thoughts pinned like a butterfly to a cork. I’ve been violated by indiscriminate affection to the point where I’m terrified of kindness, because it lies more effectively. At first I only felt like I had swallowed stones that ached. Every day they ground me into sand, separating every cell into something that was less than it was, until finally the pressure of repeated unfaithfulness began to compress my unhappiness into a new substance, something hard that coats the inside of my skin and helps me grow bitter. It ages me, steals my fire, my wonder, and simmers with black depressive anger, but it protects me from treachery. I’m caught needing what I’ve locked out in self-defence. I hate my lessons, engrained through wretched repetition, that want cheapens, that desire is as shallow and common as injustice and just as fun.

It’s a beautiful day for global warming.

Watching my reactions, where words don’t trespass, I see where they flare up like temper at every taste of hope, striking me like a physical blow, dragging a corrosive stain to taint every thought. I try to close my ears, I try not to apply my disillusion, but I don’t know that I’m wrong anymore. I’ve been gambling years for someone to be an exception.

Lucky this gives me more focus on my project, hey? Yeesh. Which, by the way, is still progressing. I’ve been quiet here because I’ve been too busy to take time out to write anything that isn’t related to Heart of the World. (Which is still getting about 100 new hits a day). I took some time out to post tonight mostly because I don’t have to go to my day-job tomorrow and I felt I could spare twenty minutes. Tomorrow, not so much. Tomorrow I get this sucker clean. We have until December 8th to raise 35,000$CAN.

how on earth can I sleep with nightmare tectonics


Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

It’s the people absent from my bed who are changing my name, eroding at my identity like a negative space sketch of rain. I can’t help but recall my conversations, the blankets inspire me, the delicate, familiar movement of taking my glasses off and putting them on the windowsill. I’ve been setting my eyes down on various surfaces every night of my adult life, slowly evolving into someone who doesn’t like to be on top because I can’t see my love’s face from so far away. I remember Marc’s laughter, his climbing strong melody as he cradled my glasses and explained to me very carefully where he was putting them down. Another windowsill. Like mine, to the left, but not the same at all. A queen size bed but we still managed to fall off the sides. I remember Lidd crying, viciously attacking the life given to him, threatening to smash my vision to the street below. Too much alcohol, too little faith. I could see myself in a mirror then without them. Worse now, my astigmatism, my trained lack of sight. I remember lots of things, voices attached to shining blurry faces. Different colours. Lindsay, he had a desk with a computer from 1995. I put my glasses down next to the keyboard, under the red guitar that hung from the brick wall. Lindsay, whose chocolate hands made my skin look like iridescent milk.

A flash to Lung taking a picture down his pants on a dare, how we discussed Oliver’s skin tone as something to photograph nicely against mine. To my silver haired scientist twisting away from my camera, hiding under the blankets, breaking my heart. The beautiful images Alastair would send me long distance, driving my adoration from over a thousand miles away. Kyle was so beautiful I could have cried.

Repetition with improv over the top. Notes of fire, of searing words. Burning too hot, too fast, too aware of the desperation inherent in oxygen, a poison gas when taken straight. I didn’t like the wall sized mirrors in that fugitive hotel, how they turned my blurred body into a pale shifting ghost, messy hair and all. Not to say I don’t find hotels mirrors friendly. The man who is named the evening star, he grasped the delicacy of my blindness right away. Gently murmuring about his father’s death to the glow of craving a cigarette, he ran his hands along my arms, guiding me to where I needed to be. I took a picture in that mirror, wearing his shirt, my hand upraised, a final thank you and eventually, later, a good-bye. He undid the buttons and every doubt I had about my body fell off me in shards, never to return again.

These are the things that stick, a hundred final scenes. Kissing a man in a restaurant, only a few blocks from my apartment. Touching his tattoo and wondering briefly, the closest I’d flirted with infidelity, if anyone would see us. All a long time ago now, these memories held like dried flowers, delicate perfumed things, willing to break details if handled roughly. Photographs seen from the wrong end of a telescope, out of proportion, fading when the phone-calls do.

—

The Moon Festival starts tonight at 7:00. Renfrew Ravine Park, at 22nd and Renfrew.

Easy to get to by transit: Take the skytrain to 29th Ave. Station, then take the Arbutus bus five minutes to 22nd.

My fire show tonight starts at 7:30. There will be fireworks, an underage contortionist, a band made of eight trombones, a percussionist, and an erhu, and half my crew are delinquents, including one multiply convicted arsonist.

If any of the fire people on my list would like to come perform, I can toss you into our finale if you check in with me early enough.


doing things to her that belong to you


Elephant Three
Originally uploaded by anavrin.

Ever speculated on how much of a bad idea something would be, then jumped off the bridge anyway, inevitably changing everything and quietly saying “oops” under your breath, almost as if you meant it?

I’m beginning to think it’s simply how I run things. I can’t escape my name, my natural anthem of love’s disaster. Missing chances to death, walking strong and emotionally detached, I want it to end so much that it hurts bone deep. I feel like a stranger to my own body, to my own needs and choices and liabilities. Upon my breath, Sunday morning I was flying enough to let my impulses die a steady slumbering death, but today, in the smeary hour of midnight, I didn’t bother to keep myself in check.

Wearing myself out with all this sticky importance, I was in my element Saturday, not a visitor. Usually I feel somewhat out of context, a tourist in my own country, but stomping around in work boots and a corset was utterly perfect. This was the first year in five that I was also a visible performer. Pyrotech, dancer, different clothes, different steps. Tiny changes and all smiles. I almost kissed someone when they walked into a room. The partner impulse there and whole, downloaded entire into my frame without thought. Familiar and strange. I almost ruined the edges of my heart.

(Today my feet are criss-crossed with black electrical tape, my answer to the common plaster. In one place, it’s possible to see bone where I wore through my foot. Poor little toes, they will recover, but the body politic, it is not happy.)

I said I was planning on getting a good night’s sleep last night, but subtext occurred instead. I went to bed near five a.m. full of double-meant conversations, explanations slipped between words. It’s been going on all week, all before too. Supportive people, my hand being held, a place to fall to if I need it. It’s terrifying, this encouragement. I’d forgotten what it’s like.

(The mad poet, the awesome-sauce Mike McGee, wants the world to see this.)

this album is too sexy

In memory of language, I will spit you, craven, from my mouth. Every day that was a letter with you, I will burn. In memory of words, of meaning, of the double-handed dealings of my tongue between your lips, I will tear you from me, reject your chrome sensationalism, my infatuation, my glorified attachment to your acquisitive frame. I will deny and repeal all rights your hands had, all liberties of motion, all the rapacious, itching greed I had mistakenly, lasciviously, authorized and stamped with the sanctioned approval of my gentlest kiss.

I will not allow you the animistic gift of speech. It is mine.

In respect for adoration, I will not name you. Your face will be blank, as slate on concrete, as lacking in feature as you were in grace. In respect for devotion, I will not need you, not crave or desire your golden smile, your irrevocable beauty, your unfortunate habit of junk crashing my mind. I flatly refuse to focus on your absence or notice the anger on my hands, my thwarted fingers, or my dizzying feeling of rejection. Your singular admiration will sink into time like twinkling stars into a cold winter sea, your voice will be like an aftertaste, and the flame of your being will be as to ashes dusted out of a failed marriage bed.

Medical-tophat, the creator of The Doctor Pepper Show, has a flickr account.

The latest in WTFJapan: “I think I have that song for DDR” with dubious thanks to Ed, who wants to know why Japanese women “sound so uncomfortable?”

Stevie Wonder setting fire to Sesame Street with an injection of pure funk into the Sesame St. Song and Superstitious.

I remember the feeling of being a widow



Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

As if I’d conjured him with thought, I encountered the sweet latin-american cocaine dealer on the bus again, the one I’d lent my copy of Pattern Recognition to weeks ago. He was sitting in the back wearing a black oversize Francisco football jacket, huge dark blue jeans, and a face that cheerfully lit up with recognition when I said hello. I like him, he doesn’t know what to do with me, and past our brief conversations, we have no social connections. When he told me he’d called me, I belatedly realized that he must have been the mystery caller that I’d been neglecting to call back, assuming, due to the timeframe, that it was the producer creep who’d got my phone number off a drunken friend in a nightclub. I hope he calls again. I hope he reads the book. I picture him at home, flipping it over in his hands, reading the back cover again, wondering what sort of person I am to give it to him like that.

Trojan Nuclear Plant Implosion – May 21, 2006

My birthday is quick coming up. Celebrations are to begin this week. Wednesday evening, there will be a gathering of like-minded individuals for an All-You-Can-Eat chocolate fondue at the Capstone Tea & Fondue (1118 Denman). It’s something like a $10-ish minimum tab per person. I would appreciate an RSVP as the venue is very small and I feel we should warn them if a slavering horde is to descend upon them and ravage their fruit like a glittering pack of starving crows.

Next on the list, I’m trying to find myself a ride to Seattle for Sunday, May 28th, the day before my birthday. After that, there’s talk of a party at my place for June 3rd. Nothing concrete yet, but words have been happening and words tend to have this nasty habit of becoming plan without anyone noticing. Just keep it in mind is all I’m saying. The week after that is the masque June 9th, (which you’re also likely invited to, just say the word and I’ll see what I can do).

Man with viable(?) rocket boots – 2005

My brain keeps playing callous tricks on me, blatantly assuming I have someone to come as my date to various special things, (a birthday dinner with my godmother, the party in Seattle, the masque), then reminding me as I reach for the phone that I’m not welcome to love certain people anymore, that I am to remember that such thoughts are supposed to be anathema. It’s frustrating, to be so pleased and then so hurt in the flash of a second. It’s not like I was shed yesterday or even last week. I should be used to the thought by now that I wasn’t worth more than a beddable test-drive instead of these contemptible, brief, indefinite intervals of softly smiling, touchy-feely experience, thinking that there’s someone special I’m still allowed to see.

you could have told me less casually


naiad
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

When you say, you in the plural, in the too many of you, “I’m not telling my wife,” I have a perception shift as a tense block of knowledge creaks suddenly into place. You are partitioning me away, removing my reality. You are creating a space for me, which has nothing to do with your solid life, that is to abandoned as soon as primary characters arrive. I’ve done this before, had to live as my role is reshaped around me into the idea of my body and grace, I know what you’re doing before you do. When I look down into my lap with resignation, what else is there to do, it is with this understanding. From there on in, your honesty diminishes every time you kiss me. You might not even see it. Every time my hand is held, every time I am told that I am loved or treasured, our light dims, laced with the knowledge that I am an eradicable betrayal that you will want later to erase.

And then we playfully kiss like sticky children outside a door, we share a glance and giggle at something improbable. I carve lines in the air around your body with my breath like prayer. You hold my hand and trace the lines there, as if you could grant me immortality with the poetry of your smile. But there never is any poetry. As soon as I am out of the room, you can reattribute your actions, decide after the fact what you meant and how you meant it. It burns, your plausible explanations, how you write all the rules, how you’ll still be cruel enough to pretend that I have any say in the matter, as if I had any power except to leave.

Yesterday the line, “cradling my hips like a warm cup of tea,” popped into my head. When I was younger, I imagined that’s what I wanted. Someone who would hold my body canted to their lips as if I was a chalice of some sort to be poured. It might have even been the word canted that gave me such a fancy. Now that I’ve found a few of those people, I’ve discovered that I was right. It’s comforting to know that not everything I thought would be nice turned out to be wrong. There’s a not a lot else that I still have, not in the long run. I had a golden summer once that taught me how to smile. I cried when it was time to leave and when my then partner held me in the cloak of his obscene hair and comforted me, “Life is long, you will fall in love again, many times,” through my wracking body, I knew he was right. What he failed to explain was how few people would bother face the fear of falling in love, how they would hold back and hold back and hold back until finally, in cowardice, lose their mind and flee to be free.

edit: p.s. Finland won?? whiskey tango fff?