Tag: writing

locking my dreams

Shane Koyczan is my missed arrival. When his curtain called, I was not there. When my opportunity knocked, he was not home. He’s taking a lock of my wool hair on stage with him when he opens for the Violent Femmes at Massey Hall next week.

Laughing on stage, you’re berating me, “Why won’t you be in love with me? You owe me a toast.” Descriptions licking like letters in envelopes closed. Anger measured in minutes and hours and always sweetly winning first prize up on the stage. Darling Sara and I’m always so damned proud. Write, hand, write and I ran after you and held you as your cried. Victories as complex as the sun on your thankful face.

I’m making him a charactor in my entry in the upcoming Sinister Bedfellows Anthology:

I’m in the wrong place, but he’s not. A frieze of clouds over the city, orange light reflecting off wet pavement. This is Vancouver. A pane of glass grubby with too many small town fingers. When dawn comes, the light changes, everything goes gray. I remember his voice breaking in the exact shade of the sky when he told me he’d miss me, like the air he inhaled was an echo.

Hold me, I thought, hold me and protect me with your gift with words. Lift me up to where you are, so that I may look down at my hands too and watch them create lightning and thunder.

Hand in hand, I walked with him into a reflection of all our memories. This was where he touched my cheek, this is where I kissed his roommate and wished it was him. Weird baggage. Every strand of wet grass brushing our ankles is another wish, another significant glance across the cafe at me from him. Wrinkled experiences, creased and nicotine-stained from being kept folded in our pockets, folded and unfolded, pressed flat against tables to be examined like treasured maps to an alchemical marriage. Every six months, on average, he told me he loved me. Every six months for six years.

When he said he was leaving, deliberately slowly, I said I was too. In the shape of my mouth were different chances fluttering away, deconstructed. Our synchronizations were an ode to the opposite of a moth to flame, our lives never available at the same time. The king and queen of ill-timing, he said, frustrated, crowned in fluent poetry. Grieving August versus tomorrow until a hip-hop September. He was touring, I was moving away. Ahead of us was time, new and unused, that we could no longer afford to buy. There would be no following me home across an entire ocean. Dog-paddling would have been the death of him and his arms too thin to fly. Without sufficient concentration, he would have just crashed into an airplane anyway, to show how much he believed in the indestructibility of love, decorating the thin air with orange flames and pieces of melting vinyl seating. He was that kind of guy.

We met long ago, when I still grinding the last edges off being a teenager. There was a show in a shabby semi-legal basement venue on Commercial Drive called The Cavern. I never figured out how I was hired. Our audience sitting in creaky dented fold-out chairs, dark enamel flaking off more every evening, he was part of the wildly rhyming entertainment, waving his hands around, telling it like it was and comparing life to bumper-stickers. I was tech, manipulating video feedback to create psychedelic paranoid explosions of light. However unlikely, something blindly meshed. We enjoyed the summertime flavour in the alley outside the amateurishly black painted plywood door while he smoked and made fun of the dripping red letters that stood in for a sign. The other performers, I still know them sometimes, but never as well. Names fading. Las Vegas pompadours hard like black-jack and legendary Quebecois hockey stories I couldn’t relate to. Girls with guitars singing the same shrinking angel song over and over on little open mike stages.

There was a date once, if you squint. We sat on a playground across from a group of elderly Italian men playing bocci on a long narrow court covered with fine gravel and ate gelato from clear fluorescent cups with luminescent plastic spoons as equally neon bright as the cups, as science-fiction improbable as tampering with the rate of enzyme mediated chemical reactions. Just an afternoon.

Now the only time I see him is in expensive looking interviews on television, cunningly mixed with fluid clips of his glowing performances. They’re so relentlessly polished. I attempt not to examine my reactions too closely. His shirts remain button-ups, but now they’re made of thick coloured Egyptian linen and the buttons are interestingly crafted in the shape of Japanese chrysanthemums instead of round discs of cheap milky plastic. I can see where they’ve tweaked his round face in an attempt to make him look conventionally handsome. I’m not sure if it’s worked. Even pixilated, he looks like a lost tourist. I can still see the blossoming moon through his shotgun glare. It was never a question of trust. We were mythology, as brass bound by story as we were to our relationships.

I watch him, sometimes, when I can, when I remember. I finger the earring I accidentally pulled from his head once, silver like his new buttons, and try not to listen for my missing description.

it’s too late at night for harmony

Hey mister, are you in a hurry?
I have this package, it needs to be delivered.
It’s a matter of life and death.

In the event of an emergency,
we ask you to please remember to
keep both hands within the safety zone.

It was a dozen roses
I did not know what to do with.
So I hung them in the kitchen
until they dried into powder.

Please believe me.
This manuscript is the one
that will change my career.

On transit, she watched faces.
Tired to find someone to talk to.
Sometimes she would smile if
they were reading a book.

Seems the way, the solution
to finding the melody
is right in front of you.
It’s called sheet music.

She sings swing low sweet chariot
when she’s shopping for cotton.

You don’t cry enough.

In his dreams he is a doctor.
He had no business in the hospital.
It was an accident he cut you.

The color of leaves falling
is such a cliché
it’s a wonder the trees
don’t die of shame.

My lover used to be mythical,
I found him in the pages of a book.
Shame when he met me
I wasn’t pretty enough.

The clerk at the shop with the
healing crystals has too much acne.
Obviously, she never listens to
the right kind of music.

Chapter one is brilliant.
It reads like a phone call between
Einstein and someone who
grew up poor in New York.

She walks on the outside of the curb
and tells him it’s so if there’s an accident
she’ll get hit first.

Dear, you don’t understand.
I need to learn these lines by tomorrow.
If I don’t, I’ll be fired.

The moral majority has
declared that you’ve stepped too far
This time we expect you
to relinquish your relationship
with the child.

Prosthetics are too expensive.
Your eyes are beautiful just the way they are.
Plastic can’t replace liquid honey.

My troubles with gods began
when I was very young.
I found a book in a hotel drawer
read it and thought it was poor fiction.
No one alive could believe that.

He just kept repeating
the same haunted phrase over and
over “Please yellow bird.”

The mayor claimed it was for
liberty and honour
that he cut the ribbon on the bridge.
Really, it was so he could drive to work
ten minutes faster.

You lied but I would still marry you.

Skin as soft as gentle spring rain,
that’s what it was going to be covered in.
Leather like butter, like a naked
teenager with no self control.

The postcard of San Francisco
arrived with no name so he left it
on top of the stove
and forgot.

You are pensive and often melancholy.
You are everything the internet tells you
except you don’t need viagra.

I wanted hexadactyly when I was little.
My girlfriend wanted a baby.
We split the difference and sewed our
mouths together with red surgical string.

Grandfather claimed that
junk food was communism,
fine in moderation but
not the a way to win the war.

These wings of balsa wood may
be too thin to hold my weight
If you want, you can have the cat.





parsley and vitamin C can induce miscarriage without too much sickness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now it’s only a matter of raising bail.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the closest I’ve ever come to begging

I stepped outside with no direction except away from the fear. Years long, it lay unjustified until tonight. Solid, it destroys, shreds. My feet stopped at the edge of the street and I watched my hands gather snow into a little ball. This runs deep. I’m beginning to feel my lack of sleep like a knife. Every hour I laid awake in the past week is now a weight tied to a vice that’s seizing my throat closed. I didn’t look away when my body stood and began to walk. I was too busy locking my joys away in logical conclusions that describe why I should always know better. Who am I to ascribe worth to my self? This is the argument. This is the cause and self-hatred. Hope should never be let into my house. It has keys and is cruel. The piece of snow my body heat turned into ice became a metaphor and I threw it violently down, away, and didn’t look when it shattered.

>slowly

I did not ask to be let in to their room, but I was welcomed. My coat was told to come off, my scarf and shoes as well. The hat was to live on the back of the couch, come stay. It’s cold outside and we’ve made things with chocolate. My sad suspicions told me this was a bad idea, this was a moral test I would fail, but I stayed because the welcome was genuine and it is not their fault that I am wary and wounded. I sit pointed away, a puzzle composed of elbows and knees that fold into themselves and touch nothing else, and I am hesitant to speak, to intrude upon these people who were not planning for me, who do not know me except as an accessory, but I am handed a cat and expected to be at ease. Expectations and cats are fabulous pieces of social control. Peer pressure, peer pressure, watch some of our television and learn to be a little more real to our eyes.

I should have left when my trust kicked in. Comfort isn’t allowed right now. I should know this more thoroughly than anyone. It hasn’t been at all this year. Instead my lessons require stronger aversion therapy, because look – I’ve made the same mistake twice. When he came in, I put down my dignity, the very little I’m left to scrape together, and invented gods to pray to, so that it might rate some significance to another human being. I never should have come without being called. It was a very cold walk home, long because I couldn’t see through my salt stinging pretence of integrity. There are no angels, only people with wings. A woman stopped me half way when she said, “Hey honey, don’t look like that. If they see you’re broken, they won’t want you.” My feet gave out and she kept walking. Tomorrow I’ll find out if I bruised my knees, all I know now is that I can barely feel my fingers.

There is no distinction in writing this down, but it allows me to communicate with the ether. The vast formless place that language came from. I have been realizing this is my spirit guide, this is my starving on top of the mountains. I try to make here worthwhile with information dissemination, as if every link were an apology to the possibly hypothetical reader. Of course everything here is public. No matter how useless or sacrificial I am to my needs, no matter how exasperated I am at myself for pretending to worth, if it weren’t, this would be the equivalent to screaming into an empty box, closing it, then expecting to hear echoes the next time it’s opened.

I was taken care of in every way that never matters to me. That’s why I forget, you see, because needs and desires are different ripples on the dance floor and my body can twist without me. Bread is nothing, but oh, holding my breathe for me. (‘?o baby i wouldn’t like Death if Death were good:for when(instead of stopping to think)you begin to feel of it’). The heart, that’s what insists on guiding me, that’s what needs to be fed when it complains. There was a warmth in my hips when he sat with me. I remembered how suddenly his hands had defined the curves of my memories, but I knew by the tilt of his laughter that I wasn’t going to be let in where I’ve needed to be. Out(in)side is still starving, there is more than an empty two days. There’s a few years backed up, complaining, waiting for me to address them in some grand speech. Last week I whispered to them. “Remember that name you’ve always kept secret? It’s talking to me.” Last week I forgot who I am, and persisted as who I used to be. See, last year I knew how to smile.

  • Ted Dewan designed a series of “DIY traffic-calming happenings,” including living room furniture sets in the middle of the road.
  • Atheist group offers free porn in exchange for Bibles.
  • Steadman, a band that released their whole catalog as MP3s when Elektra folded, is seeking donations.

    • you’d think I would have figured this out sooner, but no

    Let me measure this in ancient yellow string.

    The length about my finger. Reminding me, the ticking clock. I’m wasting time, it’s sorrowful.

    &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp So one day I see him and another day I don’t. The mental pull that tells my body what tasks, what tasks do I do now, what tasks, oh his feather and face, his body is warm, better than mine when we’re together, it. Skip, fast forward, the inside of my need is black. How shameful, this tense coil spring around my. Skip, pull on me. Want me too. Do this, believe.

    How far around the palm of my hand. Open as conductivity, the electrical sound of that slap.

    &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp And every day I can’t stop thinking.

    I think I love you.

    It’s a good thing they can’t see inside of my head. This shift of weight, it’s guilty, heavy with barbed moments of lucidity. Memory, armor, that little touch of wet tongue to the tip of my. Skip. This devil in me bought with hurting too much, with being too old for all my age, for never getting to just relax.

    The distance around my fist.

    He didn’t mean to hit me. I didn’t mean to hit him. It was instinctive like the setting sun. Defend.

    &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp So I come back to this window, fascinated by unfamiliar fear. I want to be brought in from the cold, but I am terrified to pluck at the blanket. Other side of the glass, I turn and look outside, my vision crowded with every possibility. That one was a drunk, he might be dead. That one, he was ruined when I found him. That one, I was never as interesting as he was. That one, and this one, ten in all. Too far away, oh my bleeding heart. Even a child can count to ten. Even a girl like me.

    I’m scared of my second paragraph.

    I’m going to dance on my own grave

    Vogue, December '05

    A ghost slid into bed this morning and placed a little kiss on my lips. He was cocaine pale like a stone and as smooth as if water tumbled. I frowned and turned my head, the dead are not welcome in my bed, but he was persistent. My body began to hold the smell of suicide, of unhappy older women trapped in elevators. A long way to hell, I thought. The distance between his chilly hands and the last button of my shirt. The dead are clever, they orbit the lonely like satellites. They are a constant undertow trying to drag dreams too deep, close enough for them to touch. They promise success, but deliver only the cold light of the television. And this one was trying to take off my shirt.

    The other side of time, I might have let him. The static song of his seduction was soothing, calming as a technocratic lullabye. Instead I opened my eyes, reached out my hands, and tangled his wings with the wire and string of my hair. Ghosts are small, collections of mental bacteria built up over uninteresting lives. They are usually as romantic to the eye as a plain white t-shirt. Capturing them is only difficult if you believe in angels and I am too old now. All my bridges with mystery were burned a long time ago. Sitting up, I examined the glow I caught. His eyes were a building tumbling down, a video clip on constant repeat, surrounded by a halo of jasper. A city creature then, sailing his ship through history. I wonder if he regrets how he survives. The lives he must have crept into as a memory, the ambitions and aspirations he’d cruelly siphoned off paper hearts to live off. I swear they have intelligence. Some inbred understanding of language, built layer by layer as they accumulate.

    Romance lasts little over a year, Italian scientists believe.

    she is so pretty, so pretty, yes, like I remember, oh milk, they gave me milk, like pixies, a thousand names, pale like I am now, but to live, oh pretty, fire, flame, smoulder, a lamp dying, oh to touch, rain, blood, she burns, a spoken word, glimmering, pale like crystal, her skin, give me, please, her skin like milk

    Kiss may have been fatal.

    There are small silver scissors next to the bed. I take them and cut the ghost from my body. It’s still whispering, wrapped in my hair, waiting to wreck the party, but quieter now. I’m beginning to be awake enough to think. I lie back in the bed and watch the steel gray dawn coming in. Last night’s phonecall was me drunkenly walking a crooked line. I remember every word he said, how he’s busy lately, how the world is spinning too fast for a visit. His absence must have been broadcasting as loudly as teenagers flirting at a check-out counter for the ghost to have found me so recklessly easy. It’s either merciful or frightening to think that the slippery sound of my heart is so enticing. Maybe I should use some of those orange pills in the cupboard.

    In the kitchen I find a jar the size of a fishbowl to put my new pet into. I spit into it and punch holes into the lid with a fishing knife before dropping him in with a crumpled page from one of my favourite books. The words reverberate and the paper begins to decay softly around him as he makes a little bed. Another happy ending ruined. The idea scrapes at the embers of my ruined evening and fuels my inner annoyance at how easily I push over. If I were a better person, I would stand up for myself, pound on the stubborn shore at the ugly sea that’s been drowning me. This is what I tell myself as I pour myself a glass of water. I pop the pills and notice the ghost is glowing brighter. Feeding him with my saliva was a good idea. Keeping him around will force me to resist the urge to burn this place down.

    That and he’s beautiful like a jade fire.


    Yelena Yemchuk
    Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

    A pleased yet raffish smile deepened the perfectly etched lines around his face, around his closed eyelids. A sigh, and he looked up into my eyes. His own were very light, a sensuous honey infused with the essence of dead cities, empty of orthodox sins, and extremely open in a sense that has nothing to do with age, but with the eternal youth of ancient things. I thought of gods, the old greek imaginings that drove women to madness. I thought of braille and souls.

    I could describe him more, but I don’t know if you would recognize him walking down the street. He wears t-shirts and black pants just like everyone else. If he wore his hair unbound, then I might have a chance to let you stop, say hello, and examine him, see him for how beautiful he is under the poorly worn cover of being unexceptional. His hair is an inky explosion caught by a very clever illustrator, someone who fell in love with myths at an early age and let it reflect in every halo they ever drew. It’s exceptional. When his hair is wet, it catches in my throat and fills my lungs with the need to say that I am drowning. Maybe if you saw him in rain, drops caught like cliché jewels in his lashes, there might be a flash of recognition, a glimpse of how divine.

    I feel so antique, describing a lover in terms of looks, but I am always transposing feelings, depths of emotion or dialogue, and yet so few ever know who I’m revealing, even when it’s myself. Earlier in the car, when I tugged on Andrew‘s hand and said, “Oh! I have news! Persepolis has fallen.”, he understood what I meant, but Tyler did not. “We talk in shorthand.”, Andrew explained, and it occurred to me that here I write in it. A code of association so baroque that only by reading for any length of time will meaning emerge from the tangle of references. Truthfully, I find myself most comfortable with people who can follow abstract trains of thought without effort, but I’m beginning to question if it’s fair. I’m wondering how often my privacy is misread. (Graham got the impression somehow, in spite of my practically rabid monogamy in the face of people like Dominique and Christopher, that I was promiscuous.) At times, it’s been psychotically useful, but part of why I continue to update almost daily is that I want to explain to my friends and family my keystone ties and transformations.

    Matthew hated when I wrote about him but he would never tell me a decisive why. He would spin gluey reasons that would change, but always, (no matter how mutable), they were negative. I think, now, especially near the end, that he was trying to hide his whereabouts and actions from people who might possibly read this. After he came back, he attempted to expressly forbid me from mentioning that I stayed the night, and was upset when I ignored his injunction. (I still don’t know who wasn’t supposed to know this time. Last time it was Sarah. I know his wife used to drop by occasionally to catch up on things, her best friend tried to step in and defend him once from one of his first terrible injunctions against my decency before she understood what my complaint was, and there are other people. Friends, family maybe. I don’t know, they just show up on my counter and leave rare anonymous comments from IP addresses located in Perth or Sydney.) My next closest relationship, they were always delighted when they could find reference to themselves in my entries. It filled their heart, they said. Made them feel exponentially appreciated, like every letter added to their worth. My friend Wilhelm, he complains that he never appears here, that I only write about people I can hyperlink to, but I know that I put his little misdemeanors of complexity here quite often, so how else can I reply except by becoming, if only briefly, a more concise exhibitor?

    We used to talk until the sun came up, a confused tangle of how a head will fit into an arm, how the angle of a bent leg will comfortably into the slant of another leg of a different shape. His bed was small enough for both of us, and it was going to eventually be summer. Visits were too rare, for they were addictively pleasant, and I fell very into liking him. His casual strength of thought, his delightful leaps of imagination. Ostensibly, I was living in another part of town, staying on charity at a friends apartment, but as it gradually becoming more intensely uncomfortable to stay there, this small room full with its tiny bed became my home. I would always feel welcome, but an imposition. When I visited, I would stand silent in the street with my terrified heart, trying to collect courage with the pebbles I would find to throw at his window in lieu of a doorbell. Once Loki the cat found me and sat purring at my ankle, almost causing me to cry. I wanted to feel safe, and it was ten feet away, and I couldn’t move. My housemate had pulled a dirty conversation on me earlier, full of tense demands, and I was so nervous of the world that just this little cat being kind to me was enough to unbalance me. When I crept in, quiet as to not wake the baby, I hoped he wouldn’t see my hands shaking.

    Loki is gone now, replaced by two cats. One black and one white. The baby is gone and my lover’s switched rooms. His window is an undeniable bitch to hit with a pebble now. I tried the other night, failing, as it turned out, not because of my aim, but because we wasn’t home yet, and I worried with every stone about hitting the neighbors house on the rebound. It didn’t help that my hands were shaking again, my adrenaline screaming at me that I was being an idiot. Years pass and yet I stay the same. He claims it’s brave of me. To do something I’m scared to do because I know it’s the right action, but I’m not so sure. I’m expecting to have to apologise with impeccable courtesy for merely arriving while my heart is craving vindication, some forgiveness for the hour. If I’m scared, then I’m not being brave, am I? Being brave might be writing this down, not knowing what side of the disclosure line he stands on.

    reminder: KEEP JHAYNE FROM JHAYLE -a party of proportion- #340 – 440 west hastings, Friday, November 25th, 9:00 – onward

    winding up in the sort of movie that middle aged women would take me for the hero


    city glance
    Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

    I wish you were here in my empty bed so it would not be so hollow. It’s been filled with clothing to mimic the twisting forms of company, but last I checked, sweaters don’t talk. They don’t try to keep me. I wrote once that my sheets felt like sand, that if I were to turn over in the middle of the night, absence would hit me like a blinding storm. They’re doing it again, right now, with this soft music playing that reminds me so much of your hands tracing my cheekbones when my glasses are off.

    because

    You are small beautiful simple things, like a line perfectly written, the only one in the novel that you’ll bother to remember later, but when you’re away is all the time. It reminds me of the time I missed someone to death. When it happened, my pillows and blankets quivered, shuddered, and stopped breathing. My heart was dazed, dropped from a great height, and I have yet to recover its wings from the wretched broken mess of glass shattered connection.

    because

    The shape of you fills with mistakes when you are not around to fill in. The secondary characteristic of your absence is my dwelling on how much I can’t deal with it. When I’m missing you, your smile bleeds out of my mind, to be replaced by how often I sleep alone and never with you. You right now are someone else. A heavenly creature I don’t know, who sacrifices something that looks like my integrity to an altar I’m not allowed to approach or respect.

    because

    Then it slips out, my joan of arc moment, seeping through the cracks in all my routine and argument. It’s the pattern. You cut here and put these seams together. You prick your finger on the pins that have somehow found themselves between your lips. My fear is a foot on the pedal, the sway and yank of social fabric. I’m uncertain. I can’t wear this dress, it’s heavy and the embroidery’s just tacky. Not already, not so soon, but then your voice is crashing into me. I’ve been tackled by a thousand foot wave of feeling like myself again. You push me up to the firmament.

    Tonight I thought I saw you standing on the corner of that memory, just enough out of vision that I could place you where I wanted to. It was a conversation about skin, about nerve endings. The technology that craves contact. Our first hint of compatible loneliness.

    “we’ll cook our food in a satellite dish”

    Our mother, a cessation of time. I stand alone, watch the clock, wanting the minute to never turn forward inside me. She is a music box full of the beating of hearts. Patches and sound, sewing them on stitch by stitch with second hand strings. Her skin is written like a music video, split clips of what I used to want when I was younger. She’s a stranger with brightly highlighted eyes. Her skin is as white as the walls. Electric arc, her nails on the tips of her fingers, her nails that hold up the timbres of her voice. I move in slow motion, snagging my shirt on the seconds that are training their sights on the pupils of my eyes. Advertising. My gun is her hair like copper lights, the bullet moves at the speed of dreaming. Her sighs are dedicated. The lights are off.

    Two dusty coins fall from my lashes when I blink, holding my tongue between her teeth. Two payments I didn’t think I’d made. I’m staring at rivers turning into I loved you, I’m dry. I could think of what I’m doing, but that would be the end of it. I would have to pick up my mourning shroud and don it, torment children, die before morning. Chords lashing me into a smeared black bit of making up. My palms are sweaty. She is the firmament, marker letters on her chest. Hello, You Have Never Met Anyone Like Me Before. I had a name. I’ve forgotten it.

  • hallowe’en to download music: devils & dead friends