He calls, soft, exhaustion laced, considerate, concerned. I recite, trying to remember the swirling words of the story as I find the book, flip pages to the story, “Here is the story of Mignon as I remember having read it in a famous old book.” Somewhere in my day there was news about travel, about death, difficult to process, the sort that kicks in both the head and the heart. “A young man named Wilhelm was staying at an inn in the city. One day as he was going upstairs, he met a little girl coming down.” He is driving, the sound of the city sliding by the windows, an echo of tires and commuters tinted brake-light red. I can picture him if I concentrate, the tilt of his head, the way his hand rests on the wheel, pale eyes on the road, even while in the center of my self, I refuse to believe in our structure. I hate how something so small can keep me alive. “He would have taken her for a boy, if it had not been for the long curls of black hair wound about her head.” I listen to what’s between our conversation, shoes crunching across gravel that I’ve walked across silently in bare, frozen feet, when he sits to undo his laces, the shuffling of a coat being removed and left on a rack. Habits beginning to be memorized, the shape of how he moves through space, the way he signs his name. “As she ran by, he caught her in his arms and asked her to whom she belonged. He felt sure she must be one of the rope dancers who had just come to the inn.” All of this comforting, a little bit effortless, a narrative that smooths like water over stone. I skim through the book, my favourite story on the very last page, and do my best to quietly read, warm as feathers, sharing solace over the phone. “She gave him a sharp, dark look, slipped out of his arms, and ran away without speaking.”
Tag: writing
discount
She’s getting off the bus at my stop, expensive fake glitter nails, under-age, for sale. What is there to do? Her laughter is harsh, a grinding thing, bright, painful. She walks to the corner, turns left to the stroll, knock off prada, juicy couture velour, industrial back alley bitchiness, swinging her availability like a weapon, something sharp with which to stop cars. Already she’s taken drugs, eyes blank, pupils huge. My walk is to the right, towards the apartment. I look up at the rain as I wait for the stop-light, the wet drops smearing my vision as it spatters on my glasses. I am invisible to her. I worry for her heart.
I have always been this fragile.
Song on repeat, fingers frigid from typing, everything around me perfectly still. We’re talking about dying, about family in the hospital, about relationships that never were, chances that perished almost as quickly as they had become. I think about fire, about how much tragedy stains my heart, how much sorrow clogs my breath. The boyfriend who committed suicide, the woman who was almost my mother, dragged to death, pregnant, under a truck. Family wrapped in white sheets, counting minutes. A different parent, one of many, confused, waiting to die. There was a phone-call. Later, at some unknown time, there will be another, and perhaps the person on the line and I will cry together.
I’m helplessly needless and needless to say I owe you.
Helplessly needless and needless to say I owe you.
Outside is cold, the rain has half frozen, but I expect colder still. Clothed in frost, in the shirt of someone I used to love, winter is crawling through the windows, offering loneliness in place of flowers, memories of years when I still had a future. They play out like beads on a string of days, tallied in small bursts, bright but too long ago. How is it that days are so long, while years are so short? Fractions of lifetime stretched out over bone. Cells replicating. I used to believe that one day would be easier. Soon I will be too old for it. I will be done, the last page written. The book closed. Somewhere out there, past the glass, there is snow.
Well I’d wait ten thousand picks for just one more chance, just one more chance to see your face again.
The people around me do not know how to cure this sorrow. Tender, they insist on holding me or pet my hair, as if rocking silently is enough. Shivering, I require more, to engage, to pull my intelligence out from my pain. Perspective as everything. (Not everything broken can be repaired.) On the east coast is a grandfather, lungs filling with fluid, and a boy near the phone. We write back and forth, filling the void with comforting words, distractions, poetry, and rough jokes. We write back and forth and I do not know if I am helping. I do not know if I am like my friends, heartfelt yet inadequate, offering solace that would comfort me, but not them.
Well I’d pull, teeter away, at the earth with my teeth, the earth with my teeth to touch your face alive.
The piano kicks in, quiet, insistent, with a sound like birds. I am collapsing, fracturing, splintering, shivering into pieces. If someone were to touch me, I would explode, shrapnel embedded in every wall, with a sound like a wounded animal, terrified and very, very young.
You lie helplessly still as your face falls apart.
You lie helplessly still as your face falls apart.
My stress betrays me. Inside of my belly, chemicals misfire, hormones fail. I do not release an egg. “Progesterone secretion is prolonged because estrogen levels are low”. My womb is lost, continues singing for fertility, even with the map misplaced. The walls thicken, then slough. Bleeding seven days, eight, now thirty. A flood. I grow pale. The red spills like an endless creek, enough to fill a pail. I am a tributary, coloured scarlet. Chunks of flesh escape me as big as the palm of my hand. My breath vanishes, the world glitters, and suddenly exhaustion, fatigue. It is too much effort to ask my heart to beat. I cannot move. My body is a heavy as lead, my veins filled with gold.
With wax and wires and hair from the back of your head.
With wax and wires and hair from the back of your head.
With my blood, so sleep. I am awake in the dark, endlessly so. My breath solidifies, but my dreams do not. Instead I write, I reply, my back-log of messages attacked, finally, until dawn, the sun a smudge of gray the same tenor as a cough. To a former lover, lost for too long, I write, “Your silver hair makes me think of feathers, of flight, and the purity of light seen through the fractures of a crystal. Perhaps you are, in fact, slowly turning into a dove, one the colour of lightning, a tongue like glass and a brain ripe with electricity.” Our love was a wonderful thing, poetry balanced on edge, the quirky, deprived, and mad meeting together as one. Maybe somewhere is a world where it worked out.
Well, I can make your face brand new.
Well, I can make your face brand new.
We stay up late, my current love and I, an ordinary history of affection warped by misunderstandings, his lack of experience, the way he abandoned us the first time we fought. Where do we go from here? Defining what is wrong is only a first step, almost a year late, too late, almost a year since it all began. My eyes are glued shut with salt, hot and sad. His arm bleeds where it scraped against the side of the bed. My role has been counselor, not partner. Tearing words from his tongue has been almost impossible, the squeezing of blood from a stone. Together we have been teaching him responsibility, and though he is quick, he resists.
La da la da la da da da da da da da da da da
Dawn painting the top of the mountains, the world’s orbit sliding day into place. The urge to shift from bed, to draw on the window, withers against the memory of warmth, of shifting discussions, the lace of conversation drifting over my eyes like something imagined from a far away land.
You are warm, you are warm
There are only four ways for a relationship to end; stuck together or split apart, drowned with misery or flavoured with subtle joy. Duality doubled, basics, building blocks, the future laid out as cabled strings that tie lives together. Abandonment, paperwork, making tomorrow always better than today. I fought for us until he apologized, truth the most harrowing weapon of all, and then my heart burst, as if there was nothing left inside the pain but exhaustion, terrible, cruel, but free. Even so, we are lucky. Now, no matter how it turns out, as a couple or merely friends, we will find peace. We’ll love each other until death do us part.
Come take my hand and I’ll take your hand
And I will bring you out
Come take the line and I’ll take the line
And I will pull you out
In the sun.
catching the 5 a.m. bus
He slowly loses mass while I sleep, the cells of his body evaporating into morning. By the time I wake, he is gone, as well are his things. Defined by absence, no note is left, nothing to say he was here, only a small clear space is left behind on the floor from his suitcase. He drifts away like a ghost, particles shedding into the air with every breath as I dream, his kisses vanishing with him. Sitting in the bed, I find a few stray hairs on the pillow and twist them around a finger, wedding ring proof he’s not imaginary, but still I do not believe.
creeping up on a year together
Let me fall out a window with you. Place your hand here, upon the jut of my hip, where it rests in your sleep, where you grip my body to yours from behind. Let me lean back, just a little off balance. Let me feel the center of my gravity shift and slide. Place your other hand like a cradle for my head, as it hangs backward, trying to get the perfect shot of something sixteen stories below. The shape of you, the perfect heft of you, let it join me as I slip. Let your eyes widen in surprise, then smile with me. Let your lips find mine as they do in the dark. The sound of our clothing against the sill, the relaxed, casual laughter that will explode from my chest, these sounds will protect us, keep us safe, as we listen, absently, for impact, the beginning of the end.
Before that, (our collision with the indifferent ground), let me float away with you, hands twisted in the cords of a enormous balloon, brightly coloured, impossibly huge. Place your trust in my wrists, where they strain at the ballast of our weight. Let me drift on the wind in your tightest embrace. Arms screaming, my fingers numb. Under our feet will be the sea, the turquoise horizon a feather shimmering gently away. Let us endure until land, our anatomy twisted into one tangled shape. Aceept that we are stranded. Let me make fire as you wave at ships, as you hold me close at the curve of your hip. The warmth of our totality, the sweet, delicious taste of our kiss, these things will protect us, keep us fed, as we signal, unwavering, for delivery, until the rescue ships.
calexico lays in the reins, in time across continents across time
I am sleeping tonight with a page from your diary tucked under my pillow.
February. Get ink, shed tears. Write of it, sob your heart out, sing, (Boris Pasternak)
365: 62 – 03.03.09
His voice is almost convincing, “We could always try tantric sex.” Her mind races for a few seconds, failing to place the non sequitor with any current topics of conversation, before discarding the notion altogether. This is very obviously an entirely new discussion. She thinks about the last time she felt beautiful. Once, before, even in this bed. “Where was that question six months ago?” she asks, instantly wary, “I mean it. Where?” He stumbles, reeling, “I… I don’t know.”
In one white wooden drawer are her stockings. Fishnets full of torn holes, seamless black nylons with a back seam of flashing white rhinestones, purple velvet thigh highs that stay up without a garter belt, a pair of red and black vertical stripes with the toes danced out. Electric memories of sweat, ghosts as distant as England, as far as away as reaching out three feet and yanking on a bronze pull shaped like a vacant new moon.
She feels as acutely cold as surgery, like she’s splitting her arms open and only the bright dust of stars is spilling out. “I don’t mean to be insulting, repeating this,” she says, with a feeling akin to tearing off limbs, “but that was precisely the problem in the first place. I would tell you I need mental input more than physical attention.” She taps his forehead, trying not to walk away behind her eyes, wincing that he never once breathed poetry, “And you’d only try to answer with sex.”
If Vancouver has a language, it is of clear glass flowers that only bloom in the rain, opaque & gray
He looked like any other low slung hip-hop hood, wide slouching jeans and a loudly patterned hoodie with something like the Yellow pages logo drunkenly stamped all over it in grinding red, chartreuse, and green, except that the music blaring from his shiny black headphones wasn’t rap. It was candied children’s music, something simple and Mexican, the South American aural equivalent of tooth rotting, brightly shiny sugar dots.
“Maybe I should marry a bus driver,” she thought, sitting next to him, “Settle down with someone with a steady job, who smiles at strangers. Someone with the celtic knot tattoo around their upper arm that was trendy when I was seventeen and they were twenty six. He could own a gun I would frown upon, play a little bit of guitar, and light candles instead of turning on lamps at night in the summertime.”
EAT NOT EAT
I don’t know Stu Nathan and it’s very likely that neither do you, (unless you are either Budgie Barnett who has just come out with a new book of quickfic that’s quite lovely, yes you should buy it, where you ask, why right here or Alasdair Watson of They Fight Crime.) I don’t know what he looks like, where he lives, or why he keeps a journal. If we were to meet by chance in the street, I would not recognize him. The only reason I know his name is Stu, even, is because it says so right there on his userinfo. He is a complete and utter stranger.
Why should you care? Because you should friend him. In among his regular blogging activities, he writes incredible character pieces about his fellow passengers on London transit, who he calls Tube People. Sometimes amusing, occasionally sobering, they are perpetually excellent and well worth your time.
A satisfying excerpt from a recent post:
“They clearly don’t know each other, but they have two things in common — age and class. Bundled up against the cold in overcoats and scarves, the gentleman wears an old-fashioned check cap and the lady has a cosy headscarf. He holds her arm as they board the train in the windy West London no-mans-land on the way to Heathrow, but she’s supporting him as much as she supports her.
‘Oh, thank you,’ she says, in the effortlessly penetrating cut-glass tones of the truly posh. ‘Thank you so much, I was afraid I wasn’t going to get up into the carriage.’
‘That’s quite alright,’ he replies, in a voice you can imagine encouraging the troops at Arnhem. ‘No bother at all.’ But he’s red in the face and puffing, and half-falls gratefully into his seat.
They aren’t shouting, and they couldn’t be described as loud. But their voices carry around the sparsely-populated carriage as they make the sort of small-talk you might hear at a tea-dance. Faultless manners and old-school decorum, and you can see that everyone else in the carriage is paying rapt attention. Newspapers stop rustling. Pages of novels are unturned. The volume on MP3 players is surreptitiuously lowered.
‘You said you had children? A boy and a girl, wasn’t it?’ the lady asks, her head on one side, her face attentive.
‘Oh, yes,’ says the gentlemen. ‘They’re both fine and happy, grown up now of course. Jane’s doing something in social work, living near Brighton; it’s an area called Kemptown, if I’m remembering correctly.’
‘And does she have a young man?’
‘Weeeell…’ he drawls, his eyes unfocusing slightly and a wrinkle deepening between his eyes. ‘Actually, there seem to be two young men around; they have some sort of… arrangement I don’t really understand. They don’t seem to both live there all the time, but they’re both… around. But everyone seems to be happy with it, and she has one son by each of them. And it’s a terribly bohemian area.’
‘Like a village?’ she says.
‘Oh, very like. It’s not my place to question, I think?’
‘And what about your son? What does he do?’
‘Yes, he runs his own business. He was doing something in the City, but he decided to pack it in and do something he always wanted to do.’
‘And what was that?’
‘He opened a sandwich bar with his wife.’
‘A sandwich bar? It’s not one of those places where you can’t sit down, is it? I can’t abide those.’
‘No, no, there are seats, of course there are. And you can get other things as well, hot soups and so on, and I believe there are salads as well.’ This is said in the tones of a man who has heard of the concept of salad but will have no truck with the reality.
‘And it’s doing well?’
‘Yes, very well, I understand.’
‘Oh, good! That’s marvellous. I do sometimes get peckish, you know, and a well-made sandwich is very welcome. What’s the place called? Is it somewhere I could keep and eye out for?’
‘Yes, it’s called EAT, so he tells me.’
The man opposite has raised his newspaper to hide his face, and the pages start to rustle as his hands vibrate.
uplifting through adversity
I spent last night at Lung’s place being wined and dined with David and Claire and writing a glossy, shiny happy proposal article for Reader’s Digest about Slab City, where we were staying by the Salton Sea. Considering that Slab City is essentially a small town comprised of poor and crazy people pushed out to the ultimate margins of society, it was pretty tricky. Not only did I have to write in the sappy, almost vapid style of Reader’s Digest, I had to gloss over anything untoward. Nigh impossible, but I think I succeeded. By the time I was done, I had a rough article draft which failed to note any of the incest, open meth use, unbalanced people suffering from mental illness, or the terrifying number of sex offenders. Instead it talked about how great our friends are. It was pretty awesome, like looking at the moon with a microscope.
Via Lung today:
