Tag: writing

With apologies to Max Ehrmann as initially I was only trying to remember the Desiderata

I don’t know you, but we refuse to go placidly amid the noise, which is good. For once, the haste is ours. I warn you, however, this is familiar; how I bring joy. You’ve crawled into my life smiling with a whimper and the promise of bang, both unexpected, and I find myself bound to your responsibilities because I like you in spite of them. Unexpected is understatement. You steal what I steal and replace it with truth spoken quietly with affection. We avoid the loud and the aggressive, and violence escapes us, vexations to the spirit, except in our hands clutching at each others hair. That knowledge is comforting to me. If you don’t look to force your religious opinions or your political surfeits upon others, than I will keep respect in my heart warm and welcoming and stand with you as far as possible without surrender. As long as those traps remain empty, it is not my business how you continue your life apart from me. As long as there is love there, I need not concern myself. If you choose to adopt a child and raise it, you have my utmost respect. My concerns will remain with myself and I will offer as placid a pool as possible and attempt to rinse myself of my frustrations. If you choose to raise that child into a specific lifestyle, that’s fine, as long as religion is not an excuse for intolerance. You are already braver than I. (When half a million people led by their religious leaders gather in a 21st century city to protest a law that gives opportunity for two people who love each other to raise a child, it gives me pause as to whether this is a world that I would ever want to introduce a child to.)

I am usually complicit in the world, not comparing myself to others, for there are always be greater persons than myself in my estimation, and I make every effort to know as diverse a group of people as I possibly can. Diversity brings the new, insights and experiences that I would never have discovered had I remained wrapped in my own existence. But fundamentally, I don’t know why you like me. My mien’s been trampled, there are only a fistful of similarities left; we are on good terms with most people, we find good humour in the world, we listen to others, even the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story. My skeleton is not made of such fine stuff as yours, it was spun messily and without comfort. I feel outdistanced.

My employment leaves much to be desired, but I do my best when I am present, however much I would wish to be elsewhere. When I leave, I wish to leave a positive impression and a place where I remain accepted. The world is a frequently hostile place, I want to have as little negative impact as possible. If I am to raise my voice, it should be to combat intolerance and promote distinctiveness. It is my own blindness to virtue that gives me discomfort where I’m positioned, not a lack in the striving industry of local friends. I want that as clear as the happiness in your eyes when you see me smiling back at you, granting without cynicism that you are not enough for me to stay as much as I am not enough for you to leave. In my adoration is hard knowledge sharpened on ‘I should have known better’ that states with great clarity that there can always be another human being to capture me, that there are enough souls alive to capture you as well, that we can’t find ourselves alone unless we choose to be, for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment, it is as perennial as the grass. I was not raised to be a child, though I had a right to be, instead I was raised to be strong in spirit. It may yet save me, but not from you. You are a piece of the universe unfolding the same way I am. It would be a gift to let go of everything I hold so tightly, but I don’t know how.

With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,
it is still a beautiful world.
Be cheerful.
Strive to be happy.

with the photography of Darren Holmes (a tisane is a medicinal tea)

At first I understood balance, measurement of days. I could cook on a boat like I could at home. Mesne thaumaturgy. It wasn’t like going up a mountain, where the pressure of the air changes and suddenly every recipe begins looking like a chemistry exam. Instead, I changed. By the second week, I could no longer find the chicken for the eggs, the forest for the metaphors. My cupboards were too cluttered with leftover accents given to me by kindly local actors. The first disaster came when I tried to whip myself into shape, forgetting how literal my paper-clips essay instructions into similie. A day passed before I could drag myself from bed to prepare a tisane. Another day before I could believe simple movement didn’t require the same dedication as circus contortion. The next week was better. I was jumping at shadows, stepping on edges and peeling back their skins to get to the soft pulp within. They squirm on the tongue, so sure of isolation that they don’t understand you’re eating them with that dash of pink salt, that pinch of ginger and pepper and honey and folk songs.

Polyphemos visited yesterday. His solitary eye licked my face. I flinched and fell in love, my vision obscured by his lawless spit. Dinner was ruined as the stars fell into it, torn from their hollow orbits by the sudden gravity of my invincible passion. Embarrassing, this walk through my fusion seared kitchen to our cracked china bowls. I stood between the stove and the comfortable bleach blonde table, apologizing. This happens every time. Soon, my more ornate cutlery will delicately wince when he comes, troubled by his painfully predictable effect on my mustered years, his shaggy fistfuls of tired wilting flowers.


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.

call out

Today after work I’m being bundled onto a motorcycle and being driven out to a private studio to record some spoken word. I am what we call nervous. I am also somehow lost. My only writing is what has gone up here and I am uncertain which entries to pick. I’m very in the tiny kitten step stages of thinking there’s anything of worth in here.

If you have any you particularly like, please tell me now, as I have six hours left to dig through my journal and choose what we’re recording. I have very few that I’ve thought of and suggestions are appreciated.

you can see the changes


jhayne silver curve
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

My house is divided. One night, two evenings, three days, four fingers, five. A hand without you, counted every time the sun goes down and terrified of my heart. Another night, another day, that’s two more. Arithmetic on my body. My shadow on fire, blazing something tired and nameless whenever I close my eyes and don’t hear your voice. Haunted by more words than I can encompass without looking into your eyes, by letters unwritten in every pore of my skin that remember your lips. I’m not sleeping so well. Instead I dream of stars, painful pointillist versions of a city I’ve never been to, haven’t seen pictures of. Fire on top of pillars. It’s all under the same moon, I tell myself, the words like a broken bridge tumbling into a river in slow motion. Instead my eyes sting with the splinters of roses and I imagine a painful sprouting of wings from my back. Dark feathers to take me away from here.

My fingernails are long again, white crescents I could place in the sky. I would offer to prostitute my soul if it meant that I would be able to create exquisitely as Alessandro Bavari does. His art is enchanting, captivating my eyes to the exclusion of time. I look outside and the warm air’s been pulled out over the ocean, taking the light with it like a blanket to tuck in the other side of the world.

edit: a re-write for lj user inktea

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.

do not listen to what anybody tells you

Say a division runs at four tenths of a second, the time it requires for you to close your eyes and hear your lover exhale. Let’s say that this division represents dimensions, the round average of the sound of a drop of rain hitting a lake as smooth as a licked ice-cream cone, the impact circle in the centre reminiscent of old fashioned glass. On the other hand is a ring, now removed. Let it represent how you feel about betrayal, about your teacher wrongly calling you a liar. Press the two together as strongly as spermatozoa sing love songs to a cell and divide the result with the pared down cliche pieces of what you once thought was innocence but really turned out to be ignorance. Discuss.

Take for example a train of thought, the smoke trailing behind as old scarves when they were in style, and count the number of passengers in every wooden car. Remove the conductor and their morning coffee poisoned with almond cream, instead replacing them with an empty suit as hollow as teenage aspirations. Insert as well the book heavy idea that you are neither cool nor hot. How fast are you leaving tracks toward honour and away from privilege? Show your work. Your numbers should be as fluid as the panic underneath the first time you burned yourself operating a stove or oven.

Bonus: To accurately gauge the desperation found when your parents die, plan a method of seduction to press upon all of the children found in a ten mile radius from your last french kiss. You are not allowed to use candy or calculators. These are the rules. Abide.

this is your fault

Gravity plucks
the apple from the tree
easier than any hand
from flesh to divine
it’s all memory
the contest
the days next to water

She spoke quietly, looking out a window that was really a sheet of rain, her eyes painted electric green. “We didn’t have to talk at all. This town, the lights go dim when I press the power button. There’s a gasp, a sigh, and the energy inside collapses. You into me, relationships wearing coats of particles over wire. Tonight I miss you. I remember my name from your voice, how the inflection was different.”

The phone is a bare sliver of plastic, silver and blue-lit from within. “No, I can survive like this. Bare walls aren’t as taboo as an affection lapse. I felt like that bed was a refugee camp, finally I could stop running.” There’s a cup in front of her, slowly being stirred. The spoon is tarnished, antique and ornate with a dipped rose on the handle.

“I don’t know what makes you beautiful. When you reflect off my eyes, my heart eats you as shadow, intrinsic but ethereal, to live off later. Every moment with you feeds me, satisfies hollows inside me which say, ‘we have gone hungry long enough, there is no turning back’. I can’t help myself. Your eyes shone with a light that was devastating. It was converting, a religion of only you and I together in a little nameless room.”

She smiles, a new expression. She looks cut out of time. A glossy magazine spread featuring smooth lines and gray.

“I don’t know if I can explain. I knew I was flaunting something when I came in, that I was changing rules with my behaviour, but I continued onward. Before there was you and I feeling awkward, admit it. I was pushing past and forward. I was right on track until I was derailed by your eyes. Crash and burn and this is love in a manner I’d never encountered. Suddenly I was your salvation. I was every epiphany in the middle of the night over your entire life. You were the metatron and I the heaviest mote of light to have ever been dropped spoken from your lips. You made me think of fire, of flying.” Her long hair has fallen into her face and she pushes it back with one hand as she leans back in her chair, adjusting her skirt and crossing her legs at the thigh. Her stockings are black.

“There’s many nameless rooms, I know, I’ve lived in them, but they were not that one, they were not right there. That was a flowered wallpaper sheath for power in the middle of the night, that was a terrible fire that blazed in the softest little colours. You want to know what I thought? ‘This is permission,’ I thought, ‘for anything I want to do with you. This is something I have never seen before. If I am lucky, I will see it again. There will be no furnace falling from the sky to consume you, there will be no front page accident hurling metal like rain to dash brains into the pavement.'”

ever want something to be fiction?

I went looking for you. People get lost in the darkness of a nightclub easier than they get lost on the street. Everything is badly lit to make the patrons look better, it’s just the way it is. I found you at one end, on the platform above the dancefloor, up four steps. Your back was turned from me, as usual, and I planned on sliding behind you and holding you to me in the darkness. Your face was lit by a cell phone screen, the most charming thing I’d seen all day. I was behind the row of you, walking up barefoot, feeling the scuffs in the floor made by a thousand slutty high-heels. Next to you was a friend of ours, he was laughing with a woman I wasn’t sure I knew. My form became a denial, an uncertainty. Our friend, he saw me and laughed, pulling me to his side. Who is that? I should not have asked. Everything was confirmed. I shrugged off his arm as politely as I knew and walked fast away. I just barely made it to the ladies room. I slammed open a stall door and collapsed to the floor unable to breathe, choking on illness. Somebody knocked on the wood panel behind me, asked if I was alright. I said I had too much drink. I lost everything down to dry heaves. My throat burned.

Outside I sat alone in the hallway. I was missing for over an hour. You never came to find me. You were content to say hello when I arrived then ignore me until it was time for you to leave. This is normal, however, in spite of everything I want to scream for. I couldn’t make the nausea go away. I can’t make you not neglect me. I needed to leave but it would have been rude. So many friends were there, dancing together, making a nice evening. When you came to leave me, the same as every other time I’ve ever seen you, I couldn’t look at you. I should have moved when you spotted me. Slipped away while you got caught in the fishnet crowd. I wanted to hit you. Instead I bowed my head and waited for you to come. I wanted a reason to forgive you, to forgive myself for loving you. I almost slapped you, when you tried to touch me as if I meant something, as if you weren’t lying through your teeth again. You lied to me, you lied to her. You’re happy making whores out of all of us. I almost slapped you, I almost smashed my glass into your beautiful face.